News Round-Up: How Google Works with Autocratic Regimes, UK Climate Committee Proposes More Expensive Flying and Islamic Customs on Their Way To Be Included in Law in the UK
Every 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 week, the following topics attracted our attention:
How Google bends the knee to autocratic Russia, China.
UK Climate Change Committee proposes to make flying more expensive, people eating less meat.
Net Zero costs: £180,000 every hour to switch off wind farms.
UK parliamentary committee: possessing photos of a Muslim woman without her hijab should be made a criminal offence.
How propaganda works: Kremlin new history textbooks wiped out names of deported nations.
How Google bends the knee to autocratic Russia, China
Google has cooperated with autocratic regimes around the world, including Russia and China. Following requests from governments, the company has flagged millions of items of content for removal, The Guardian wrote recently.
The technology company has engaged with the administrations of about 150 countries since 2011 that want information scrubbed from their public domains. As well as democratic governments, it has interacted with dictatorships, sanctioned regimes and governments accused of human rights abuses, including the police in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
After requests from the governments of Russia and China, Google has removed content such as YouTube videos of anti-state protesters or content that criticises and alleges corruption among their politicians.
Google’s own data reveals that, globally, there are 5.6 million items of content it has ‘named for removal’ after government requests. Worldwide requests to Google for content removals have more than doubled since 2020. Information can be taken down for a variety of reasons, such as copyright infringement, privacy breaches, defamation, or for violating the company’s policies.
Google does not publish full data on takedown requests, but it does produce a selection of summaries about certain censorship requests it believes ‘may be of public interest’. These summaries are included in the company’s Transparency Report, which it updates every six months.
Net Zero costs: £180,000 every hour to switch off wind farms
In the first two months of this year, the so-called constraint payments have cost £252 million (€305 million euros), or £4.3 million (around €5.2 million euros) a day, writes The Telegraph. This is almost £180,000 (€214,000) every hour. This money ultimately comes from energy bills.
This is up from £158 million (€191 million) over the same period last year, market data shows – an increase of 60%.
Grid operators are forced to resort to constraint payments because of bottlenecks in the network of cables that move electricity between the north and south of Britain. If a wind farm has an agreement to generate power but cannot do so because it would overload the grid, it is handed a constraint payment to reduce its output. Scotland’s biggest offshore wind farm, Seagreen, was handed £65m alone to slash its output last year.
At the same time, another generator – often a gas plant – is asked to cover any shortfall elsewhere, in the part of the network where the power is needed. Because of the short notice, this is often far more expensive. For example, on February 28, £79,507 (€94,613) was spent on switching off wind turbines while £1.2 million (€1.43 million) was spent buying energy elsewhere.
UK parliamentary committee: possessing photos of a Muslim woman without her hijab should be made a criminal offence
Possessing photos of a Muslim woman without her hijab should be made a criminal offence, members of the UK parliament have proposed, according to The Daily Mail. The House of Commons' women and equalities committee said pictures of a Muslim woman without her headscarf – taken without her consent – should be considered 'non-consensual intimate images'.
Such photographs should be treated the same as child sex abuse images, possession of which can carry long prison sentences, the MPs said.
The proposals will deepen concerns that Islam is poised to win legal protections which are not afforded to other religions under British law.
It comes after a planned definition of Islamophobia being championed by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner was slammed for risking 'a blasphemy law by the back door'.
If the proposals are adopted by the ministers it could become a crime by the end of the year.
The committee said the law currently defines an 'intimate' image as one which shows someone fully or partially nude, engaging in a sexual act or using the lavatory.
UK Climate Change Committee proposes to make flying more expensive, people eating less meat
The UK government’s climate change advisory body, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), wants the island nation’s population to change their diets and start eating significantly less meat and dairy products, The Nordic Times reports. In addition, flying will have to become much more expensive than it is today – in order to meet climate targets. Or, under current legislation, the UK government must regularly put forward legally binding measures to reach its net-zero greenhouse gas emissions targets by 2050. The CCC is tasked with making the proposals, and its latest report calls for UK emissions to be reduced to 87% below 1990 levels – to 535 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent for the period 2038-2042. “This would be an ambitious target, reflecting the importance of the task. But it is deliverable, provided action is taken rapidly,” the report argues. According to the CCC, electrification and low-carbon electricity supply should account for the largest share of emission reductions. It wants to expand offshore wind power from today’s 15 GW capacity to 88 GW by 2040, but also double onshore wind power to 32 GW. It estimates that three quarters of all cars and vans, and almost two thirds of all heavy trucks on the road, will be electric in 15 years – compared to only 2.8% of cars and 1.4% of vans in 2023. This shift will be ‘propelled by the falling cost of batteries’, it speculates.
It also believes that the electrification of domestic heating will be very rapid and estimates that half of UK homes will be heated by heat pumps by 2040, propelled by the falling cost of batteries, compared to around one percent today. Better infrastructure should also encourage more people to choose alternatives to driving – while wanting to see ‘relatively large changes in price’ of air travel to ensure citizens stay away from flying. If airlines pass on the costs to customers, a return ticket from London to Spain could increase by around £150 by 2050, according to the report, which is touted as a positive and necessary measure. The authors of the report also want to see a 25% reduction in meat consumption by 2040 – which means people eating two fewer meat dishes a week.
How propaganda works: Kremlin new history textbooks wiped out names of deported nations
New Russian history textbooks for schools in Russia have completely rewritten the history of the country and the world from 1970 to 2000, writes the Free Nations League. The new books have also removed the names of nations that were deported during the Soviet era and QR codes for propaganda videos have been added to paragraphs in the books.
A completely new addition to the textbooks is the inclusion of narratives from 2014 to the present day. It focuses mainly on the so-called Special Military Operation (SVO), which Russian officials say is ‘the term the Kremlin uses to describe its war against Ukraine’. It covers the Donbass war that started in 2014 and the Minsk agreements up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which, according to the textbook, is ‘just a special military operation’.
First, the new concepts of history reached secondary schools, and should then gradually make their way into primary schools. However, not all parts of the Russian state have the money to buy new textbooks, although it is compulsory to do so every five years. This is why, in Yakutia for example, schools continue to study history using the old textbooks.
What is the UK CCC and who elected them and who gave them authority to propagate the lie of ‘global warming’ a myth that has been debunked by all the world’s honest scientists?
Hannes
Russia/China = Communist, not just autocratic regimes
They have murdered 125+ million of their own citizens because of adopting collectivist communist ideologies. Neither country has repented of their communist ideologies. Please use the correct terminology.