“Increasingly, with these hate speech algorithms, everything you post on social media will be scanned by an AI algorithm, sometimes before you even post it, and that’ll determine whether it appears at the top of people’s feeds or gets buried.” “A lot of conservative content is way more popular than left-wing content. It does very well unless there’s some artificial manipulation,” said Bokhari later in the interview. Callaway and Bokhari also recapped the Google Tape, a 1-hour recording of the tech giant’s top executives.

“They were completely stunned by it. Sergey Brin said the decision of the American voters ‘offended him,’ he compared Trump voters to ‘extremists’… He was talking about Trump voters in the same way that he might have talked about ISIS.” “I’m sure many other people inside many other companies were dismayed at the election result, but these people control the most powerful company in the world.” “What’s scary is, there’s no law and no regulation stopping these people from interfering in the election.”

David Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary, said the anarchic behaviour of the protesters should have been quashed quickly by Hertfordshire Constabulary, which apparently sent only six officers to the Broxbourne plant when the alarm was raised shortly after 10pm on Friday.

Meanwhile, Richard Walton, former head of the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command and now senior fellow at Policy Exchange, said the group had shifted from mere protesters into organising “planned criminality, and should be treated as such”. He urged police to get better at gathering intelligence to uphold the law and intervene “before such acts of criminality”. “Their reticence to do so undermines our democracy and strengthens extremist groups like XR,” he said.

Yet perhaps counter-intuitively, this actually tells you less about the attractions of gold as an investment than it does about the way the value of the pound – and virtually all other fiat currencies – has been eroded in the intervening years by the ravages of inflation. The two things are opposite sides of the same coin (as it were). Gold has broadly held its value relative to the cost of everything else, but sovereign currencies have not.

It is this calculation that is fuelling the current frenzied demand for gold, and the consequent near doubling of its price over the past year to nearly $2,000 (£1,494) an ounce. In uncertain times, gold comes into its own as a means of defending wealth. Over the past 50 years, the dollar price of gold has risen 54-fold. In Hambro’s view, there is no reason it shouldn’t do the same again over the next 50.

“That’s why the famous Doomsday Clock has been moved closer to midnight every year Trump has been in office,” Chomsky said to back up the claim. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a group of scientists and academics managing the clock, has “abandoned minutes [and] moved to seconds – 100 seconds to midnight” this January, the intellectual said.

A vocal critic of US interventionism and historically not a fan of Trump, Chomsky insisted that the President – who isn’t shy of bragging about America’s nuclear deterrent – “has continued his attacks on the arms control regime which has somewhat limited the enormous threat of nuclear destruction.”

This time, however, the occupation lasted more because it used the Deutsche Mark instead of armies, concentration camps and other deadly weapons, which, in 1999, it renamed as the Euro and imposed on all other wealthy nations of the European Union. Now, there are likely to be ordinary citizens from Main Street who will irrationally influence, and not by Cartesian* logic as the Germans usually do, the next electoral process.

...With Angela Merkel having entered into the sunset of her political career, and with no real political successor in her party, the major German political parties are galloping towards a decline. Germany has lost its momentum. Therefore, the next German leader may be elected democratically… by anarchists, the jobless, desperados, and all kinds from the “Neo” class – neo-Nazis, neo-poor, neo-Communists, et al, all of which are children of austerity.

It is only a matter of time. Germany is a country of discipline and order and Germans need to be ruled by a strong leader… The new German leader, in order to survive and dominate, will necessarily have to discover an enemy of German society and destroy it… What is difficult to say is whether this will be the best or the worst-case scenario.

[*The four rules of Cartesian logic are: (1) accept nothing as true that is not self-evident, (2) divide problems into their simplest parts, (3) solve problems by proceeding from simple to complex, and (4) recheck the reasoning - Britannica]

In a five-page memo sent to federal agencies on Wednesday whose subject is "Reviewing Funding to State and Local Government Recipients of Federal Funds That Are Permitting Anarchy, Violence, and Destruction in American Cities" and signed by Trump, the president orders them to report to the White House Office of Management and Budget on any funding that could be redirected. New York City, Portland, Seattle and even Washington, DC are among the initial targets of the measure.

"My Administration will not allow Federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones," Trump says in the memo, which mentions New York Mayor Bill de Blasio by name twice. To ensure the federal funding is not wasted or "spent in a manner that directly violates our Government’s promise to protect life, liberty, and property, it is imperative that the Federal Government review the use of Federal funds by jurisdictions that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction in America’s cities."

In a tweet late on Wednesday, Trump followed up the memo by saying that his administration "will do everything in its power to prevent weak mayors and lawless cities from taking Federal dollars while they let anarchists harm people, burn buildings, and ruin lives and businesses. We’re putting them on notice today."

According to FOX News: The new mandate, set forth by Contra Costa County District Attorney Diane Becton, makes it tougher to prosecute looting cases in the county, which sits just outside San Francisco. Investigators must now consider “was this theft offense substantially motivated by the state of emergency, or simply a theft offense which occurred contemporaneously to the declared state of emergency?,” according to the policy reported by local outlet East County Today.

In making that determination, they must also consider five other factors, including “was the theft committed for financial gain or personal need?” Isn’t there a Commandment against this? Don’t civil societies understand the significance of this Commandment?

“China will gradually decrease its holdings of US debt to about $800 billion under normal circumstances,” Xi Junyang, a professor at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, was quoted as saying on Thursday, without giving a detailed timeframe. “But of course, China might sell all of its US bonds in an extreme case, like a military conflict.”

China, the second largest non-US holder of Treasuries, held $1.074 trillion in June, down from $1.083 trillion the previous month, according to latest official data. Dropping to $800 billion from the current level could mean shrinking its holdings by more than 25%. Analysts say large-scale Chinese selling, often referred to as the “nuclear option”, could trigger turmoil on global financial markets.

However, the president of the Victorian Bar, Wendy Harris QC, said she was concerned about the arrest. “In the case of Ms Buhler, who was arrested and handcuffed in her home in front of her partner and children, the Bar is concerned that the enforcement action of the police… appeared disproportionate to the threat she presented,” she said.

“The Victorian Bar is concerned that the enforcement response to Ms Buhler’s conduct is apparently at odds with other reported and more measured responses by authorities to organisers or promoters of similar protests planned or carried out in contravention of public health directives.”

Harris was likely referring to Black Lives Matter protests, which haven’t been met with the same consequences. Authorities responded by absurdly claiming that BLM had been allowed to organize protests because they had promised police they would maintain groups of no more than 10 people spaced 100 meters apart, something which clearly didn’t happen. Australian police have also been caught on camera numerous times physically assaulting people in the street for not wearing masks.

“In this tragedy, that humanity as a whole continues to experience, science and technology have, of themselves, proved insufficient,” Francis said. “What has proved decisive instead is the outpouring of generosity and courage shown by so many persons.”

Despite frequent appeals to “science” during the months of the pandemic, battles raged over exactly how to interpret the data that was becoming available and rifts frequently appeared among the scientists themselves regarding issues such as the efficacy of mask-wearing, the usefulness of drugs such as hydroxychloroquine, and the lethality of COVID-19.

The original study produced by King’s College, London, in March was off by orders of magnitude, predicting 2.2 million coronavirus deaths in the United States alone and leading to panicked responses around the globe.