News Round-Up: 184 Suspected Arsonists Arrested in France, A Body of Fauci Lies, and Canada Enforces New ‘Hate Speech’ Law
Twice a week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye – or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.
Over the past few days, the following topics attracted our attention:
184 Suspected Arsonists Arrested in France
A Body of Fauci Lies
Canada Enforces New ‘Hate Speech’ Law
184 Suspected Arsonists Arrested in France
France’s Interior Minister Laurent Nunez announced on Tuesday that an individual has been remanded in custody in connection with starting the raging wildfires in south-east France.
The minister said that since the start of summer, the internal security forces have apprehended 184 individuals and they are showing total determination to identify every arsonist: “no leniency toward those who endanger lives, expose our firefighters to risk, and destroy our heritage.”
Arrests have also been made in Spain, which suffers from equally devastating wildfires. The Civil Guard has arrested one person and is investigating another over the Burgohondo fire, which officials said could have been caused by negligence involving heavy machinery used when a period of restrictions were in place, local media reported.
The wildfires in both countries have caused extensive damage to the local population, with around 360,000 people having to be evacuated. As both countries have faced a heatwave, it has been extremely difficult for firefighters to extinguish the wildfires.
A Body of Fauci Lies
Entries from early 2020 in a now-exposed personal diary kept by Anthony Fauci during the COVID-19 pandemic show that he privately estimated the death rate from the illness was significantly lower than what he told Congress under oath only weeks later, Fox News reports.
Fauci was the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) during the Covid crisis and became the leading public face in the fight against Covid-19. “The stated mortality over all of this when you look at all the data including China is about three percent. It first started off as two and three,” Fauci said in testimony before the House Oversight Committee on March 11, 2020.
“I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around one percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu,” Fauci continued. “I think that is something that people can get their arms around and understand.”
But on Feb. 8, 2020, about a month before that congressional testimony, Fauci expressed privately that he believed the virus’s mortality rate was much lower than what he later told lawmakers.
“[Former CDC Director] Tom Frieden called me this AM and we discussed various aspects of the outbreak,” Fauci wrote. “He and I are on the same page in thinking tht [sic] this is acting like a bad influenza in its transmissibility and that the denominator is much greater than 34,867 (above) making the case fatality rate (CFR) more like 0.2-0.3 % rather than 2.0%.”
In essence, this once again gives grounds to believe that Fauci has lied to Congress, which is a criminal offence.
This is not the first time Fauci has been caught lying to Congress. In May 2021, whilst answering questions from Senator Paul, Fauci lied about the circumstances surrounding coronavirus gain-of-function research carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, and the funding for that research. The US government has now published documents on this matter, which show how the NIAID, led by Fauci, allocated millions of US taxpayers’ dollars, including approximately $600,000 via EcoHealth Alliance – an organisation that came to prominence during the Covid pandemic – so that experiments could be carried out at the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s laboratory to study coronaviruses derived from bats and to enhance the virulence of these viruses. Fauci essentially denied before Congress that such experiments had been carried out under his supervision.
Fauci was pardoned by President Biden in January 2025, and the Trump administration has not charged him with any crimes.
Fauci will testify about these controversies before Congress today.
Canada Enforces New ‘Hate Speech’ Law
Government officials in Canada are contacting people at their homes over social media posts written months or years ago, according to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), Reclaim The Net reports.
The legal advocacy group says the reports began arriving after Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, cleared Parliament. The law received royal assent on June 18 and came into force on July 18, expanding Canada’s “hate speech” offenses, raising penalties, and eliminating defenses that had limited prosecutions for what the state calls hate-related expression.
“We are receiving reports that some Canadians are being contacted at their homes by government officials about social media posts made months or even years ago,” the JCCF wrote.
The Act makes hate-motivated crime a standalone offense and creates new charges for intimidating or obstructing people at places of worship, schools, and community centers. It also criminalizes the public display of symbols used by listed terrorist groups, two Nazi symbols, and a noose. The law defines hatred as “an emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation.” Police and prosecutors decide which posts meet that description.
Maximum sentences for offences have been raised, ranging from two to five years for lesser offences, five to ten years for the next tier, and up to life imprisonment for the most serious hate-motivated crimes.