17.4 C
Auckland
Tuesday, November 26, 2024
type here...
Home Blog Page 1459

GTA fans notice Confederate flag removed in remastered version

Daily Telegraph NZ
-
0
GTA fans notice Confederate flag removed in remastered version

A depiction of a Confederate flag has been apparently scrubbed from a remastered version of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The omission is a puzzling one for a series so renowned for courting controversy.

Rockstar Games’ ‘Grand Theft Auto’ series is known for its blend of gratuitous violence with dark satire and toilet humor. While other developers have been known to remove offensive content from their games under pressure from the woke (Blizzard Entertainment removing an in-game slur against orcs, for instance), Rockstar has usually stuck to its guns, defending graphic depictions of torture and murder, pushing back against legal efforts to hold the company responsible for real-life murders, and only self-censoring one line of text from ‘Vice City’ in which the player is urged to “Kill all the Haitians.”

However, Rockstar has preemptively removed a depiction of the Confederate flag from an upcoming remastered version of ‘Vice City.’ Ahead of the game’s release next month, an eagle-eyed fan on Reddit noticed that one of its characters, a bank robber and weapons expert named Phil Cassidy, no longer sported the Confederate flag on his t-shirt. The shirt’s other designs remain in place, but the infamous ‘Blood Stained Banner’ has apparently been replaced with a skull.

There is no evidence that Rockstar was under any sort of public pressure to cut the flag, and its omission led the Reddit poster to wonder “in a trilogy that laughs in the face of political correctness, what else have they altered to please a modern audience? Radio ads/discussions? Character dialogue ? Objectives?”

As some commenters expressed regret that Rockstar has “become the thing they mocked for so long,” others suggested that the tshirt may have been edited solely for the trailer. Rockstar has not commented on the apparent change.

Any change may not have been Rockstar’s doing either. The Vice City remake is being released in a bundle alongside remastered versions of ‘Grand Theft Auto III’ and ‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,’ with the new versions of all three titles developed by Grove Street Games, but published by Rockstar.

Flown by the Confederate States of America in the dying days of the Civil War, the version of the Confederate flag in question has been used since by some Americans to express pride in their Southern heritage. However, critics say the flag symbolizes slavery and white supremacy, and in an era where all things Confederate – including war memorials permitted to the former Confederate states by the victorius Union in an effort to preserve the post-war peace – are being dismantled and removed, flying the flag is now considered by many to be a gesture of hate.

Watch: Man slaps provincial governor during inauguration in Iran

Daily Telegraph NZ
-
0
Watch: Man slaps provincial governor during inauguration in Iran

A military officer who was reportedly incensed by his wife being forced to receive her Covid-19 jab from a male has disrupted the inauguration of Iran’s newest provincial governor by walking on stage and slapping the dignitary.

Video footage of Saturday’s incident begins with the newly appointed governor of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province, Abedin Khorram, standing on stage at a podium as he prepares to give his inauguration speech. The unidentified assailant walks from the side of the stage and whacks Khorram with a powerful slap to the side of his face head.

The blow was so loud that it echoed through the auditorium. The clip shows Khorram turning toward the attacker, who confronts and pushes the governor before security forces finally rush onto the stage. Several of the security workers pull the man off the stage and into a side room.

Iran’s official IRNA news agency said the attacker was motivated by “personal reasons,” though Khorram later told the audience that he didn’t know the man. Iran’s Fars news agency said the assailant was angry that his wife had to get her Covid-19 vaccine shot from a male nurse.

Khorram, a former commander in Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), stayed calm during Saturday’s rare security breach and didn’t try to strike back. He was reportedly among 48 Iranians who were kidnapped by anti-government fighters in Syria in 2013. The Iranian nationals were later released in an exchange for more than 2,000 militants.

The new governor returned to the stage after order was restored and alluded to his time in Syria, comparing it to being attacked at his inauguration. “I do not know him, of course,” Khorram said of the assailant, “but you should know that although I did not want to say it, when I was in Syria, I would get whipped by the enemy 10 times a day and would be beaten up. They would hold a loaded gun to my head. I consider him (the attacker) on par with those enemies but forgive him.”

IRNA said the attacker was a member of the IRGC’s Ashoura Corps, which Khorram used to oversee. President Ebrahim Raisi appointed Khorram as governor of the northwestern East Azerbaijan province on October 17.

Turkey to declare US, 9 other ambassadors including NZ ‘persona non grata’ after call for release of jailed opposition figure – Erdogan

Daily Telegraph NZ
-
0
Turkey to declare US, 9 other ambassadors including NZ ‘persona non grata’ after call for release of jailed opposition figure – Erdogan

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he instructed the foreign minister to declare 10 ambassadors, including Washington’s envoy, ‘persona non grata’ over a rare joint statement urging release of a jailed opposition figure.

The move was announced by Turkey’s president during a public speech on Saturday.

“I gave the necessary instructions to our foreign minister, I said that you will handle the denunciation of the 10 ambassadors as soon as possible,” Erdogan said.

Turkey arrests 81 suspects linked to Gulen in crackdown against Muslim cleric who Ankara accuses of being behind 2016 coup.

The furious reaction was prompted by a joint statement, released by the 10 envoys earlier this week. The ambassadors urged a speedy and just resolution to the case of Osman Kavala – a Turkish businessman and philanthropist held in jail without conviction since late 2017. Kavala faces a large number of charges, including alleged financing of anti-Erdogan protests and participating in the botched 2016 coup.

On Tuesday, the envoys of Germany, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the US were summoned to the Turkish Foreign Ministry over their “irresponsible” statement and “politicizing [of] the Kavala case.”

The joint statement was published to mark the fourth anniversary of Kavala’s first arrest. The businessman has already been tried and acquitted twice on charges related to the 2013 Gezi Park unrest and the 2016 failed coup. This, however, has not done Kavala any good, as orders for his release have been overruled with new charges immediately after the acquittals.

Kavala’s supporters, however, believe him to be a political prisoner, targeted for his human rights work in Erdogan’s ‘increasingly authoritarian’ Turkey.

Fauci DID fund Wuhan virus experiments

Daily Telegraph NZ
-
0
Fauci DID fund Wuhan virus experiments

After months of President Joe Biden’s top health adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, insisting his institute “never” funded gain-of-function virus research in China, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grudgingly admitted otherwise.

In a letter sent to Republican lawmakers on Wednesday, the NIH’s principal deputy director, Lawrence Tabak, admitted that a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance did conduct experiments on coronaviruses in China with NIH funding, but denied this had anything to do with the virus that causes Covid-19.

“The limited experiment described in the final progress report provided by EcoHealth Alliance was testing if spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model,” Tabak wrote. The mice infected with the SHC014 WIV1 bat coronavirus “became sicker than those infected with the WIV1 bat coronavirus,” he added.

“Regardless, the viruses being studied under this grant were genetically very distant from SARS-CoV-2,” the virus causing Covid-19, Tabak insisted. He attached a genetic analysis of the virus used in NIH research (WIV-1), along with SARS-CoV-2, the original SARS virus, as well as RaTG13, “one of the closest bat coronavirus relatives to SARS-CoV-2 collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” and BANAL-52, a bat coronavirus recently identified in Laos.

While there is a 96-97% similarity between SARS-CoV-2 and the RaTG13 and BANAL-52 bat coronaviruses, they are “far too divergent” to have been its progenitors, Tabak said, pointing out that humans and chimpanzees have the same degree of genetic similarity.

“The analysis attached confirms that the bat coronaviruses studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant could not have been the source of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic,” he wrote.

Fauci has repeatedly brushed off claims that his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) or the NIH funded such research, even after being presented with documents showing they gave money to EcoHealth Alliance, which partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to research bat coronaviruses potentially infecting humans.

It was EcoHealth head Peter Daszak who spearheaded efforts to denounce the ‘lab leak theory’ of the virus’ origin as a conspiracy, which was then used by social media platforms to censor critics.

Tabak’s letter does not mention the phrase ‘gain of function’, but speaks instead of “research involving enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential (ePPP),” and says the NIH determined it did not fit the definition of such research “because these bat coronaviruses had not been shown to infect humans.”

Critics quickly pointed out that this amounts to word games. Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who has repeatedly challenged Fauci on gain-of-function funding, pointed to the letter and said the research involved absolutely fits the definition.

“If the experiment combines unknown viruses and tests their ability to infect and damage humanized cells, of course the result is ‘unknown’ before the experiment,” Paul tweeted. “But it is not ‘unexpected’ that the virus gains in function,” he added, pointing to the mice in the experiment getting sicker.

Dr. Richard Ebright of Rutgers University told the National Review that the NIH-funded work by EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan lab “epitomizes” the definition of gain-of-function research.

“Fauci emphatically denied that money went toward so-called ‘gain of function’ research,” Ebright tweeted on Thursday. “Fauci now has lied to Congress three times on the same subject. Knowingly, willfully, and brazenly. And, so far, with complete impunity.”

Fauci has repeatedly clashed with Paul on the subject, insisting that neither the NIH nor his institute ever worked with the WIV, or that EcoHealth Alliance grants were significant or amounted to gain-of-function research. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told the senator in a heated exchange in July. Paul responded by referring Fauci to the Justice Department for lying to Congress.

 

Sick puppies: Fauci under fire from lawmakers after reports of US taxpayer money spent on cruel drug experiments on dogs

Daily Telegraph NZ
-
0
Sick puppies: Fauci under fire from lawmakers after reports of US taxpayer money spent on cruel drug experiments on dogs

Members of Congress are demanding answers from White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci after it came to light that his agency funded experiments that included cutting the vocal cords of beagle puppies to silence their cries.

We write with grave concerns about reports of costly, cruel and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs commissioned by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID),” 24 Republican and Democrat lawmakers said on Thursday in a letter to Fauci. The letter noted that as director of NIAID, Fauci had directed $1.68 million in taxpayer money to fund medical testing on at least 44 beagle puppies in 2018 and 2019.

An invoice sent to NIAID included a line item for “cordectomy,” a procedure in which the animal’s vocal cords were slit “to prevent them from barking, howling or crying,” the letter said.

This cruel procedure, which is opposed with rare exceptions by the American Veterinary Medical Association and others, seems to have been performed so that experimenters would not have to listen to the pained cries of the beagle puppies. This is a reprehensible misuse of taxpayer funds.

Fauci and puppy experiments news

The signatories to the letter, including such congressional representatives as Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) and Ted Lieu (D-California), pointed out that the FDA has said that experimentation on dogs isn’t required for approval of new drugs.

They demanded to know how many such tests NIAID has funded since 2018 and how much money was spent. The representatives also asked Fauci to explain why he has continued to commission testing on dogs, inasmuch as it’s not required, and what his agency has done to find non-animal alternatives. In addition, they sought more details on the cordectomies, such as the cost and reasoning behind the unnecessary procedure, as well as information on whether dogs have been made available for adoption upon conclusion of the testing.

The testing on beagles was exposed in August, when a nonprofit group called the White Coat Waste Project (WCW) obtained documents on the experiments under the Freedom of Information Act. The group alleged that Fauci has directed funding of “wasteful and brutal” beagle experiments at labs in Tunisia, California and Georgia. Such research was also done at the headquarters of the National Institute of Health (NIH), parent of NIAID.

Dubbing the controversy ‘BeagleGate’, WCW said US-funded research at the Tunisia lab involved drugging puppies and locking their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies to infect them with disease-causing parasites. Researchers also locked beagles in cages overnight in the desert to use them as bait to attract sand flies.

The aim was to test an experimental drug on the diseased beagles. The dogs were six to eight months old, and they were all killed and dissected upon completion of the tests, according to WCW. NIAID-backed research at the University of Georgia involved injecting beagles with experimental vaccines and infesting them with parasites, the group has said.

WCW also claims to have been first to expose that US taxpayer money had funded gain-of-function research on viruses at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The firestorm over dog testing adds to the controversies surrounding Fauci, who had testified to Congress that he didn’t fund gain-of-function research. The NIH admitted this week in response to a congressional letter that its funding had been used to conduct gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.

As the US government’s highest-paid employee, Fauci oversees the NIAID’s $6 billion budget, including research grants. News of the congressional response to the beagle experiments raised fresh online outrage on Saturday.

For some observers, the taxpayer-funded puppy experiments raised questions about testing on humans. “Wait until they find out about the human experiments,” conservative pundit Candace Owens told her 2.9 million Twitter followers.

Hamilton hit and run driver identified

Daily Telegraph NZ
-
0
Hamilton hit and run driver identified

The driver of a vehicle involved in a hit-and-run incident in Hamilton this weekend has been identified.

The accident occurred on Boundary Road, Claudelands, at about 2am Saturday morning. The offender had been driving a silver coloured vehicle at the time.

The victim remains in hospital in a critical condition and the police investigation is ongoing.

104 community cases of COVID-19 today

Daily Telegraph NZ
-
0
104 community cases of COVID-19 today

There are 104 new community cases of COVID-19 to report today.

As at 10am, 43 of these cases are linked – including 33 household contacts – and 61 remain unlinked, with investigations continuing to help determine their connection to the outbreak.

Here’s a breakdown of the numbers:

  • Number of new community cases: 104
  • Number of new cases identified at the border: Two
  • Location of new community cases: Auckland (91), Waikato (8), Northland (4)*, Nelson Marlborough (1)
  • Location of community cases (total): Auckland 2,389 (1,369 of whom have recovered); Waikato 81 (14 of whom have recovered); Wellington 17 (all of whom have recovered); Northland 4, Blenheim 1
  • Number of community cases (total): 2,492 (in current community outbreak)**
  • Cases infectious in the community: 53 of yesterday’s 129 cases have exposure events
  • Cases in isolation throughout the period they were infectious ** : 76 of yesterday’s 129 cases
  • Cases epidemiologically linked: 43 of today’s 104 cases
  • Cases to be epidemiologically linked: 61 of today’s 104 cases
  • Cases epidemiologically linked (total): 2,172 (in the current cluster) (274 unlinked from the past 14 days)
  • Cases in hospital: 55 (total): North Shore (8); Middlemore (19); Auckland (27); Waikato (1)
  • Average age of current hospitalisations: 43 years old
  • Cases in ICU or HDU: Five
  • Confirmed cases (total): 5,194 since pandemic began
  • Historical cases: 173 out of 3,381 since 1 Jan 2021

Sovereign Hikoi of Truth to protest vaccine mandates

Daily Telegraph NZ
-
3
Sovereign Hikoi of Truth to protest vaccine mandates

A protest movement against the vaccine mandate has gained a large following on Facebook, with plans to undertake a Hikoi to Waitangi on 26 October.

The group known as the ‘Sovereign Hikoi of Truth’ (or S.H.O.T) has accumulated more than 6,000 followers since it was created just two days ago.

Sovereign Hikoi of Truth news

In a video posted by one of its Admins, Carlene Louise, the group is calling on New Zealanders of all races, religions and backgrounds to join the Hikoi and come together to oppose the government’s vaccine mandate. She also accuses her iwi’s leaders of receiving ‘millions upon millions’ of dollars from the government to roll out the vaccine programme.

The video is available to view by clicking here.

Two GPs speak out on ‘COVID madness’

Daily Telegraph NZ
-
0
Two GPs speak out on ‘COVID madness’

Dr. Ate Moala and Dr. Justine Mesui, medical doctors with extensive experience in working in New Zealand, particularly among Pacific and Maori communities made a subsmission recently to the Parliamentary Select Committee considering the Public Health Response Amendment Bill.

The Bill proposes new government powers to deal with the COVID crisis.

Dr. Moala posted video of the submission on her Facebook page. Both doctors spoke and made passionate representations to the Committee, explaining the devastation the government’s policies were having on the Pacific and Maori communities they serve, such as:

  • Causing division among families, churches and other groups.
  • Forcing people to take the vaccine or lose their job.
  • The sickening practice of the government using gimmicks like free KFC to coerce vaccination among lower socio-economic populations. These practices were an insult and akin to the Dawn Raids of the 70s and other inherently racist policies.
  • They asked why the government was forcing this vaccine through at speed, without consultation, and spending millions of dollars on the roll-out, when far more pressing needs, such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease were more pressing, and had never received such funding in the past.
  • The government’s vaccine roll-out and COVID control measures were undemocratic, not based on science, not justifiable to achieve standard public health aims.

Dr. Moala and Dr. Mesui also spoke out about how they and their colleagues had been ‘gagged’, for fear of losing their jobs.

The full video can be found at Dr. Moala’s Facebook page, by clicking here.

 

 

Watch: PCR tests are not suitable for testing COVID or infectious diseases – Inventor

Daily Telegraph NZ
-
0
Watch: PCR tests are not suitable for testing COVID or infectious diseases – Inventor

If you’ve tested postive for COVID, there’s a high probability you never had COVID at all.

The PCR test for COVID, used by the governments around the world, including New Zealand, is not suitable for testing for COVID or other infectious diseases.

But don’t take our word for it. This is the view of Professor Karry Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1993.

It’s also the view of many of the world’s top scientists, doctors and professors, including: Dr. Mike Yeadon, Prof. Carl Heneghan, Dr. Sam Bailey, Prof. Beda Stadler, Dr. Roger Hodkinson, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Clare Craig, Prof. Stephen Bustin and Dr. Tim O’Shea, to name a few.

Even Anthony Fauci admits the test is unreliable.

The problems with the PCR test are:

  • It was invented for DNA analysis, not for the testing of infectious diseases, including COVID-19.
  • The PCR testing process involves magnification of the sample, each magnification level is called a ‘cycle.’ At the cycle levels western countries are using, this involves magnification factors in order of trillions. At that level of cycles, you are not finding COVID, but chemical compounds that are found in many other substances. The proportion of ‘false positive’ tests is so high as to render the results scientifically and statistically useless.

Watch the video to see what the real experts say:

1...1,4581,4591,460...1,471Page 1,459 of 1,471

© 2021-24 dailytelegraph.co.nz