Sunday, March 13, 2022

News roundup 13 March 2022

 News Roundup 13 March 2022

 


    • Did flawed PCR tests convince us Covid was worse than it really was?

      ” – Part one of the Mail on Sunday‘s investigation into the U.K. Government’s handling of the pandemic looks at how reliable the PCR test is.
    • U.N. Warns Russia's War In Ukraine Could Spike Global Food Prices By 22%

      Authored by Julia Conley via Common Dreams,

      With dozens of countries around the world relying heavily on both Ukraine and Russia for food supplies, the United Nations warned Friday, the ongoing war is likely to significantly drive up global food prices and worsen malnourishment in the Global South. With both Ukraine and Russia's ability to produce and export food uncertain, a global supply gap "could push up international food and feed prices by 8% to 22% above their already elevated levels," said the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

    • India Is Mulling Rupee-Ruble Payments System For Trade With Russia

      India is discussing how to set up a rupee-ruble payment mechanism to enable it to trade with Russia, to circumvent the U.S. sanctions regime.
  • Why Sanctions Don't Work, And Why They Mostly Hurt Ordinary People

    Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

    The United States and its Western European allies have in recent days repeatedly increased economic sanctions against not only the Russian regime, but against millions of ordinary Russians.

    It has done this by cutting much of Russian trade and Russian finance out of international markets. Moody's and S&P Global have both downgraded Russia's credit rating. The US has frozen Russian reserves and cut many Russian banks off from SWIFT, the international banking communications system. Europe is planning on big cuts to its purchases of natural gas from Russia.

  • Biggest Commodity Trading Houses In The West Continue To Buy Russian Oil And Gas

    Despite headline-grabbing maneuvers by the big western oil giants (Shell, BP, Exxon-Mobil etc.) to simply walk away from certain Russian projects, commodity traders like Trafigura, Vitol and Glencore have all loaded cargos of oil, gas and fuel onto tankers at Russian ports, which is just the latest evidence that the west can't simply go without Russia's commodity wealth (as Chinese analysts have explained, Russia is one of the richest countries in the world when it comes to natural commodity wealth). And it's not just industrial commodities: the Middle East and Africa depend on exports of Russian wheat.
  • Forget About Covid, They Say

  • ” – Forget about Covid and live life as normally as possible in defiance of those who live to foster fear. But, never forget what they did, says Jeffrey A. Tucker at the Brownstone Institute.

  • ‘People’s Convoy’ Meets with Senators” – The ‘People’s Convoy’, the group of truckers protesting vaccine mandates, now express their grievances in Washington D.C., reports TrialSite News.

  • Pfizer jab reduces risk of Covid infection for five to 11s by 31%” – The CDC published a report Friday finding that the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is 31% effective at preventing infection for children aged five to 11 years old, reports the Mail. So, by its own admission, at under 50%, not effective enough to approve.

  • We’ve allowed narcissistic eco martyrs to booby-trap our energy markets” – The market could easily solve the crisis now facing the West – if we let it, argues Juliet Samuel in the Telegraph.

  • Extinction Rebellion’s eco-fanatics are the very definition of dangerous extremism” – With Putin rampant and energy prices soaring, there is no excuse for their selfish posturing, writes Douglas Murray in the Telegraph.

  • It’s time to drop the Net Zero agenda” – For years British energy policy has been an exercise in wishful thinking. We’ve been living in a fantasy world in which Britain can somehow achieve ‘Net Zero’ by 2050 without paying any serious economic price, and with no one significantly poorer as a result, says the Spectator in this leading article.

  • Parents’ fury as £32,650-a-year school teaches there are ’64 genders’” – Interim head at ASL Sacha McVean defended the school to parents saying its programmes had the backing of schools leaders and the watchdog’s inspection was ‘unusual’, reports the Mail.

  • Tory PCC slams bid by Crispin Blunt to ‘silence her on women’s rights’” – Lisa Townsend is a rare, defiant voice on an issue that’s become so politically charged that this week that two Labour front-benchers failed to define what a woman was, writes Rebecca Hardy in the Mail.

  • Top Russian biologist turns on Putin’s propaganda” – Moscow microbiologist Dr. Yevgeny Levitin has accused the Kremlin of “pure lies” and “propaganda” for claiming Ukraine had secret biowarfare labs which “could attack Russia”, reports the Mail. So what are the labs that the WHO is so worried about then?

  • Ukraine’s NATO Membership Is Not ‘Relevant or On the Agenda’: Jens Stoltenberg” – Ukraine’s NATO membership was never “imminent” and will not be on the agenda in the near future, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Friday, reports the Epoch Times.

  • EU says it needs five years to wean itself off Russian energy” – The EU has said it needs five years to wean the bloc off Russian gas, oil and coal as the country’s invasion of Ukraine sparks chaos in energy markets, the Telegraph reports.

  • Three ways the Ukraine war could crash the financial system” – It is quite conceivable that things will get worse than they already are, warns Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.
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  • Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s ports will cripple global food markets” – An estimated 15 million tonnes of wheat, corn and barley are currently piled up but unable to be exported, reports the Telegraph.