News Round-Up: Sunlight, Clouds as Climate Drivers, Horrifying Rape Stats in London, and Hefty Fines for VPN Users in Brazil

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:

• After X ban: Brazil threatens VPN users with huge fines.

• Sunlight and clouds drive climate, not CO2.

• Horrific rape statistics in London.

• Research: The New York Times was fuelling Covid fears.

• Less trouble: German train conductors no longer ask immigrants for tickets.

After X ban: Brazil threatens VPN users with huge fines

Brazil, which banned the social media platform X in the country a couple of weeks ago, is now enforcing the ban. Amongst other things, it foresees hefty daily fines for VPN users who hide their online traffic and continue to use X in this way.

If Brazilians want to access X now, they can do so using a VPN service. VPN, or virtual private network, allows users to hide their internet traffic from prying eyes, including their location.

At the end of August, Brazilian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered a total ban on X in the country. The reason for this was X's refusal, at the request of the state, to censor users of the platform whose posts critical of the politicians currently in power in the country were not liked by the powers that be – including, for example, an elected senator and a 16-year-old girl.

At the end of August, Brazilian Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered a total ban on X in the country. Photo: Palácio do Planalto/Wikimedia Commons.

The banning of X means that all internet service providers (ISPs) had to and did block access to the platform. However, this does not guarantee that users of VPN solutions cannot circumvent the ban. Now the same judge, de Moraes, has imposed a hefty fine on anyone who tries to do so – €8,000 for each day of infringement, reports The Epoch Times. The average Brazilian earns the same amount for a whole year. While Brazil, unlike China or Russia, has not developed an effective censorship infrastructure and VPN use is more difficult to monitor, people's interest in X has indeed plummeted since the threat of a fine. Advocates of freedom of expression and the internet now fear that Brazil could set a bad example for other countries by taking these measures.

The countries that Brazil has modelled the step on deserve to be singled out as well. X has been banned in countries that do not stand out in terms of respect for human rights, such as China, Russia, North Korea, Turkmenistan, Myanmar, Iran, and Pakistan.

Sunlight and clouds drive climate, not CO2

The Earth has warmed as a result of absorbing more sunlight because of reduced global cloud cover, not because of more greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, a recently published research paper argues.

Ned Nikolov, a physical scientist at the University of Colorado in the United States, and Karl F. Zeller, a retired USDA Forest Service research meteorologist evaluated how Earth’s decreasing albedo has affected global temperature during the 21st century. According to their model and analysis, 'the observed decrease of planetary albedo along with reported variations of the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) explain 100% of the global warming trend and 83% of the GSAT interannual variability as documented by six satellite- and ground-based monitoring systems over the past 24 years'.

So the warming cannot be attributed to more anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere, according to the authors.

Sunlight and clouds drive the climate, not CO2 according to a recently published research paper. Photo: David Ballew/Unsplash.

“CO2 is an invisible trace gas that does not interfere with sunlight,” Nikolov said to The Epoch Times. “It’s believed to trap thermal radiation coming from the surface, but that’s a misconception because the absorption of longwave radiation by CO2 and heat-trapping are completely different physical processes. According to the second law of thermodynamics, heat-trapping is impossible in an open system such as the atmosphere.”

He said that while water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, it becomes visible when it condenses and forms clouds. And because clouds “reflect solar radiation back to space,” their effect on the climate is “measurable and significant.”

“Cloud formation is partially controlled by cosmic forces. When clouds decrease, the planetary albedo drops and more radiation reaches the surface, causing warmer temperatures,” Nikolov said.

“In our paper, we show, using the best available observations from the [CERES] platform, that the warming of the last 24 years was entirely caused by the observed decrease of Earth’s albedo and not by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations as claimed by the IPCC.”

Horrifying rape statistics in London

A rape offence is reported every hour in London, BBC writes, according to data they obtained.

More than 8,800 rape incidents were reported to the Metropolitan Police in 2023 which is an average of 24 a day. Charities have called the findings "horrifying" but say the true extent of sexual offending will be far higher.

The data also shows a further 11,000 reports of other sexual crimes were reported to the force last year, with almost a quarter of all reported crimes from people aged under 18.

The police are not up to the task, say some of the victims. BBC talked to a rape victim who says she handed the police a phone with evidence and said the police returned it after six months. “I found out that they didn't take any of the evidence off it so they called me again to ask for my phone back to get that evidence but my phone broke so effectively, from that moment on, I knew that the case was going to be dropped because literally all of the evidence was gone,” she said. “Victims already feel that everything is the victim's fault, but the police will definitely ensure that you feel that way,” she added.

Research: New York Times was fuelling Covid fears

In a recent study, researchers at the University of California looked at articles published by the New York Times during the Covid crisis and found a worrying degree of bias.

Researchers from the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco had analysed corrections to articles published in the NYT on coronavirus pandemic. The aim was to identify the bias in news stories, as 62% of Americans already considered the media to be biased in a 2018 opinion poll. Even now, the researchers found ample evidence that the NYT's coverage of the Covid pandemic was not unbiased and generally overstated the risks of the virus, writes City Journal.

The New York Times fuelled fears during the Covid crisis, research has found. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Between 2020 and 2024, the NYT published 576 corrections to 486 articles that were related to Covid. It's human nature to err when reporting the news in an uncertain time of crisis and massive information overload. But the impartiality of the news can only be assumed if errors are made with a relatively even frequency. This was not the case. Newspaper errors tended to exaggerate the harm of the virus or the effectiveness of interventions taken to combat its spread. Corrections were made for such errors nearly twice as frequently as for errors that downplayed harms. Fifty-five percent of errors overstated the harm of the virus, while only 24 percent understated. In other words, when NYT got things wrong, it tended to do so in a way that falsely stoked fear and encouraged harmful social restrictions.

For example, one of the most notable mistakes by the paper is when they reported that 900,000 children had been hospitalised because of Covid-19. That figure was later corrected to 63,000. The number of corrections also varied by journalist. Ten journalists accounted for 24% of all corrections, while one journalist accounted for 7%. Such articles tended to contain not only the exaggerations of the pandemic, but also the journalist's emotions.

The authors of the study say that such a strong bias is worrying – newspapers should implement more substantive checks and balances to ensure more balanced coverage and avoid unduly promoting panic the next time a crisis strikes.

Less trouble: German train conductors no longer ask immigrants for tickets

In the German state of Thuringia, a train company urges conductors on board trains not to check the ticket of passengers with a migrant background, because of an increase in intimidating behaviour on board trains which shows that checking the right to travel can be dangerous for the staff.

The Thüringer Allgemeine newspaper was contacted by a married couple who had recently noticed on a local train that some passengers' tickets were not being checked by conductors, Remix News reports. Specifically, the tickets of migrant-looking passengers were not checked.

Asked by the newspaper why this might be, the railway company Süd-Thüringen-Bahn admitted that it is indeed within the discretion of their conductors not to ask for a valid ticket if they consider the situation to be at risk of escalation and they feel threatened or intimidated.

The railway company Süd-Thüringen-Bahn admitted that it is indeed within the discretion of their conductors not to ask for a valid ticket if they fear the passenger. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

We've written before about the fact that Germany's trains and train stations are no longer safe and that violent crimes, including sexual assaults, have exploded. Figures for the first six months of the year published in the German media show that a total of 13,543 violent crimes were recorded at train stations, half of which were committed by foreigners. The proportion of foreigners in sexual offences was 59%. However, even these figures would probably need to be revised, as many of the suspected criminals recorded in the statistics as 'Germans' are in fact immigrants or descendants of immigrants and they are recorded as 'Germans' simply because they have acquired German passports, which the country currently grants quite generously.

Similar problems haunt other Western European countries. In the UK, for example, violence against women and girls on trains has increased by more than 50% in two years.