An article from an independent Australian news site that I haven't seen before run by John Stapleton - worked as a general news reporter for The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald for more than 20 years. The article does a pretty good job of outlining the situation in Melbourne.


Melbourne Meltdown

Every single day, seemingly without end, more than five million people in Melbourne are suffering through the harshest lockdowns in the world.

Metropolitan Melbourne residents may only leave their homes for a “valid” reason and must comply with a curfew between the hours of 9 pm and 5 am.

All Victorians must wear a face covering when they leave home, no matter where they live.

For three weekends in a row there have been wild scenes as police carpet the city in increasingly violent suppression of protesters, including police chasing down protesters on horseback.

Against a backdrop of extreme tactics, amidst multiple claims of police brutality and striking scenes of riot police throwing protesters to the ground, the Covid story itself, the justification for this insane brutality, has disappeared.

The Covid story has already unraveled for a government which shamelessly sowed panic and confusion into the general public for their own purposes.

Senior epidemiologists around the world now say that Covid-19 is no worse than the common flu and the lockdowns and concomitant societal destruction have all been in vain; at best misguided, at worst a wanton and deliberate destruction of the old order. The quadrupling of the national debt, the shutting of borders, the destruction of the Federation, the crashing of industries, the introduction of what is tantamount to martial law, that all of it was for nothing.

Despite numerous stories and considerable visual evidence, including one man who ended up in hospital in a coma, Premier Daniel Andrews has claimed there is no culture problem within Victorian Police.

That sounds about as sincere as his claim that he hadn’t watched the video footage, which has been viewed millions of people around the world, of a pregnant woman being arrested in her own, in front of her children, for making a Facebook post.

Or when asked by a reporter what his response to being called “Dictator” by The Washington Post. His response? He doesn’t read The Washington Post.

The media hunt in packs. And the pack has turned.

Every night for months Sky News has been pounding on about the insanities of lockdowns, conveniently sheeting home blame to State Labor Premiers rather than the Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who allowed it all to happen.

Conservative firebrand Alan Jones is now calling for a national advertising campaign to inform the public that they have been lied to.

The chattering classes find it easy to dismiss Sky News as being right wing, a creature of the conservatives.

Which is why the significance of mainstream, left-leaning journalist Chris Uhlmann, coming out opposing lockdowns in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, should not be underestimated.

Uhlmann writes: “The Victorian solution punishes the many for the few. It preferences the very old over the young, mortgaging the future of the entire school and working age population. It is hard to imagine how you could design a policy that is more profoundly unfair or damaging to a society.

“Nowhere in this often-opaque democracy has a less transparent court system, bureaucracy, police force or government than Victoria. The people there have been badly served, even as some revelled in the servitude. Its systems of power have combined to deliver the wanton destruction of its vibrant society. Its government has condemned its people to a poorer future, to higher unemployment, more poverty and less opportunity.”

There have been numerous developments over the past week, not least of which was the very public resignation of Treasury official Sanjeev Sabhlok.

I served your government as an economist till 10 September 2020 but have resigned to protest your Police State. I did not come to Australia to be a slave of whimsical government. There comes a time in life when you need to take a stand based on your principles. I did not come here to live in a socialist society. I came to live in a free society.

On Sunday protesters, facing almost certain arrest, sang a classic song by Australian singer Johnny Farnham:

We’re all someone’s daughter
We’re all someone’s son
How long can we look at each other
Down the barrel of a gun?

We’re not gonna sit in silence
We’re not gonna live with fear

Behind him is a hapless Federal Government desperately trying to escape the odium of their Covid fiasco, now being called “the biggest mistake in history”.

Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, is on the face of it an out of control regional despot making a fool of himself on the international stage, while destroying the lives of millions.

What happens when millions of people realise that they have been utterly, completely, totally lied to?

“You dictators are ruining the country,” one protester said as he was being arrested. “This is not Victoria,” one clearly angry woman said as she fronted police. Others screamed as they were being shackled.

That people are being viciously attacked for exercising their democratic right to protest is making demonstrates to everybody that a once largely peaceful country has been destroyed in a matter of months.

What happens when they realise that Covid-19, as epidemiologists around the world are now saying, is no more deadly than the common flu?

What happens when they realise that their livelihoods, their businesses, their jobs have been destroyed by a megalomaniacal push to control every aspect of Victorian lives?

What happens when the public realise that the truly staggering multiple incompetencies of Australia’s political class has destroyed not just their own lives and futures, but the lives and futures of their children?

That in the cruelest and most vicious way possible Covid-19 has been blatantly used by Australia’s ruling classes to feather their own nests, while at the same time grotesquely expanding the power of the state.

Revolution. Rioting in the streets. A city, a state, a country, burnt to the ground.

John Stapleton has also written a book called Hideout in the Apocalypse

Here's the Amazon blurb:

Hideout in the Apocalypse is about surveillance and the crushing of Australia's larrikin culture.

In the last three years the Australian government has prosecuted the greatest assault on freedom of speech in the nation's history.

The government knew from international research that when it introduced the panopticon, universal surveillance, into Australia it would have a devastating impact on the culture.

When people know they are being watched, they behave differently. Dissent is stifled, conformity becomes the norm. This is the so-called chilling effect.

Hideout in the Apocalypse, in the great tradition of The Lucky Country, takes Australia's temperature half a century on from Donald Horne's classic cautionary tale.

Now the future has arrived. Forced by a plethora of new laws targeting journalists to use novelistic techniques, in his latest book veteran news reporter John Stapleton confirms the old adage, truth is stranger than fiction.

Hideout in the Apocalypse takes up the adventures of retired news reporter Old Alex, first encountered in the book's predecessor Terror in Australia: Workers' Paradise Lost. But as befits the times, this book is more fantastical, intimate and politically acerbic in its portrait of his beloved country.

Alex believes believes he has been under abusive levels of government surveillance since writing a book called Terror in Australia, and as a natural empath can hear the thoughts of the surveillance teams on his track, the so-called Watchers on the Watch. Alex also believes he is a cluster soul sent with others of his kind to help save the Earth from an impending apocalypse, and has the capacity to channel some of history's greatest writers.

Australia might have the worst anti-freedom of speech laws in the Western world, but how can you sue a character like that?

Stapleton's essential theme: a place which should have been safe from an impending apocalypse, the quagmire of religious wars enveloping the Middle East, is not safe at all.

Ideas are contagious, and the Australian government is afraid of them. Australia is a democracy in name only.The war on terror has become a war on the people's right to know, justifying a massive expansion of state power.

Alex's swirling head, lifelong fascination with sociology, literature and journalism, and his deep distress over the fate of the Great Southern Land, makes him the perfect character to tell a story which urgently needs to be told.

Edited to fix quote boxes.
 
Could we have more context please?

Where is this and what is happening in the video and why is it happening?

Is it an anti lockdown protest?

The facebook page says it's a protest against the lockdown in Argentina, but it's not true. I know because I'm from Argentina, and that's a protest from last year by extreme left wing groups ( Party/Polo Obrero) of Trotskyist origin. The group's flag (in red with yellow letters) is from Party/Polo Obrero.
 
Second AstraZeneca volunteer reportedly suffers rare neurological condition, but UK company says it’s not related to vaccine
On September 6, trials of the drug were paused again, after the second woman felt ill, but they resumed in Britain, Brazil, India, and South Africa less than a week later. The US hasn’t yet green-lighted the continuation of the test, however.

AstraZeneca, which has administered its vaccine to some 18,000 people worldwide, said in internal documents that the two cases of the illness were “unlikely to be associated with the vaccine, or there was insufficient evidence to say for certain that the illnesses were or were not related to the vaccine.”

Transverse myelitis is a serious and rare disease, and its repeated cases among the participants of the trials may well see AstraZeneca losing its vaccine bid all together.

Move along folks, nothing to see here. It's just a random coincidence. This vaccine is perfectly safe, just like all of the other ones. [/sarcasm]

! HEALTH (1).jpg
 
Just came across this study by Oxford University in which they're demonstrating that at least 30% of deaths in the UK attributed to Covid weren't caused by Covid at all.

Which, isn't really news at all, however I find it interesting in light of the recent AstraZeneca debacle with their vaccines and some of the bad press they have been receiving, I know Oxford university has been helping develop the vaccine. So could this be simply some infighting?
A very to the point 30 mins from investigative journalist Jon Rappoport via Solari report in which he postulates there is effectively no such thing as death by COVID-19 for anyone - that there never was a novel Coronavirus, and that in his 30 years of research into virtually all sham-demics (particular AIDS and Swine Flu) they follow the same pattern of grabbing something that is next to nothing other than a minor variant on a pre existing theme, hyping the hell out of it to create a genie in the bottle via the media and corrupted power systems, then when the jar is hot enough, let it loose (as a mind program) and lay claim forever more that anyone with a wide range of complex, health issues (be it underlying conditions, poor lifestyle, local variations due to pollution and EM/5G, vaccine accumulation, stress and incarceration, uncle tom's cabin and all) has died from it. In effect they are creating a mind-based propaganda syndrome that has no basis whatsoever in a single 'one' thing' as he calls it. They just hoover up every form of death and lay stake to it via brain-washed medical system. Its just this is the mother of all fake syndromes and its clearly learned from all previous versions and is going for the global jugular.

I have to say I'm convinced he has a point. In particular when he rightly states how the truly open, scientific process that would have to be undertaken to prove such a novel-virus (and one that was then peer-reviewed and replicated) has absolutely not taken place - and is in effect blocked from happening anyway because of patent control over all aspects of independent COVID-19 research - and how no one, no one is pointing out this rotten base to the whole rotten tree.



 
A very to the point 30 mins from investigative journalist Jon Rappoport via Solari report
A unicorn with a mask - yep, it's all make believe! Or even a magick trick?

Time loop or time warp? 30 years ago is emerging in relevant topics. More blasts from the past including Biden '88 from wiki plus the candidates/election campaign - and overlap into the George Floyd racial component that will skew off-topic a bit:
Joe Biden's campaign also ended in controversy after he was accused of plagiarizing a speech by Neil Kinnock, then-leader of the British Labour Party.[35] The Dukakis campaign secretly released a video in which Biden was filmed repeating a Kinnock stump speech with only minor modifications.[36] This ultimately led him to drop out of the race. Dukakis later revealed that his campaign was responsible for leaking the tape, and two members of his staff resigned. The Delaware Supreme Court's Board on Professional Responsibility would later clear Biden of the law school plagiarism charges.[37]

The candidates seeking the Democratic party nomination were:
Republican candidates
Libertarian Party
Ron Paul and Andre Marrou formed the ticket for the Libertarian Party. Their campaign called for the adoption of a global policy on military nonintervention, advocated an end to the federal government's involvement with education, and criticized Reagan's "bailout" of the Soviet Union. Paul was a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, first elected as a Republican from Texas in an April 1976 special election. He protested the War on Drugs in a letter to Drug Czar William Bennett

Populist Party
David E. Duke stood for the Populist Party. A former leader of the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan, he advocated a mixture of White nationalist and separatist policies with more traditionally conservative positions, such as opposition to most immigration from Latin America and to affirmative action.

During the course of the campaign, Dukakis fired his deputy field director Donna Brazile after she spread rumors that Bush had had an affair with his assistant Jennifer Fitzgerald. Bush and Fitzgerald's relationship was briefly rehashed in the 1992 campaign.

Democratic Convention
The Democratic Party Convention was held in Atlanta, Georgia from July 18–21. Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton placed Dukakis's name in nomination, but the nominating speech lasted for so long that some delegates began booing to get him to finish, and he received great cheering when he said, "In closing...".

With only Jackson remaining as an active candidate to oppose Dukakis, the tally for president was:

Presidential ballot
Michael S. Dukakis 2,876.25
Jesse L. Jackson 1,218.5
Richard H. Stallings 3
Joe Biden 2
Richard A. Gephardt 2
Gary W. Hart 1
Lloyd M. Bentsen 1

Vice Presidential ballot
Lloyd M. Bentsen 4,162

Jackson's supporters said that since their candidate had finished in second place, he was entitled to the vice-presidential spot. Dukakis disagreed, and instead selected Senator Lloyd Bentsen from Texas. Bentsen's selection led many in the media to dub the ticket the "Boston-Austin" axis, and to compare it to the pairing of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960 presidential campaign. Like Dukakis and Bentsen, Kennedy and Johnson were from Massachusetts and Texas respectively.

Results

In the November 8 election, Bush won a majority of the popular vote and the Electoral College.[60] Neither his popular vote percentage (53.4%), his total electoral votes (426), nor his number of states won (40) have been surpassed in any subsequent presidential election. Bush was the last candidate to receive an absolute majority of the popular vote until his son George W. Bush did in 2004.

348px-ElectoralCollege1988.svg.png

Presidential election results map. Red denotes states won by Bush/Quayle and blue denotes those won by Dukakis/Bentsen. Light blue is the electoral vote for Bentsen/Dukakis by a West Virginia faithless elector. Numbers indicate electoral votes cast by each state and the District of Columbia.

West Virginia faithless elector Margarette Leach voted for Bentsen as president and Dukakis as vice president in order to make a statement against the U.S. Electoral College.
Memorable tidbits:

The Democratic frontrunner for most of 1987 was former Colorado Senator Gary Hart. Brought down by Monkey Business:
20170501-Gary-Hart.jpg

That's not his wife. The photo that killed his campaign.

"It soon emerged that the woman’s name was Donna Rice, and she had met Hart at a New Years Eve party in Colorado. She had later accompanied him on an overnight trip from Miami to Bimini on an 83-foot luxury yacht with the you-cant-make-this-stuff-up name of Monkey Business. A picture soon appeared in the National Enquirer, and then in hundreds of newspapers, showing Donna Rice sitting in Hart’s lap, with Hart in a Monkey Business T-shirt."

The Vice President Debate - Quayle vs Bentsen:
One reason for Bush's choice of Senator Dan Quayle as his running mate was to appeal to younger Americans identified with the "Reagan Revolution." Quayle's looks were praised by Senator John McCain: "I can't believe a guy that handsome wouldn't have some impact."[50] But Quayle was not a seasoned politician, and made a number of embarrassing statements. The Dukakis team attacked Quayle's credentials, saying he was "dangerously inexperienced to be first-in-line to the presidency."

During the Vice Presidential debate, Quayle attempted to dispel such allegations by comparing his experience with that of former Senator John F. Kennedy, who had also been a young political rookie when running for the presidency (Kennedy had served 14 years in Congress to Quayle's 12). Quayle said, "I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency." "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy," Dukakis's running mate, Lloyd Bentsen, responded. "Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." [Wait for it . . . ]

That last line was the zinger "that devastated Quayle and helped cement his reputation as a lightweight that would follow his political career." Few have ever forgotten it. It wasn't enough to save Dukakis from his "tank" PR blunder or the "soft on crime" element injected into the race! And, as it seems the time loop is well in effect, see Reflecting on "You're no Jack Kennedy" 30 years later:


"Dukakis in the tank"
Dukakis attempted to quell criticism that he was ignorant on military matters by staging a photo op in which he rode in an M1 Abrams tank outside a General Dynamics plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan.[47] The move ended up being regarded as a major public relations blunder, with many mocking Dukakis's appearance as he waved to the crowd from the tank. The Bush campaign used the footage in an advertisement, accompanied by a rolling text listing Dukakis's vetoes of military-related bills. The incident remains a commonly cited example of backfired public relations.

220px-Michael_Dukakis_in_tank.jpg
And it was the campaign that made "Willie" Horton a household name:
There were two presidential debates and one vice-presidential debate.

Voters were split as to who won the first presidential debate. Bush improved in the second debate. Before the second debate, Dukakis had been suffering from the flu and spent much of the day in bed. His performance was generally seen as poor and played to his reputation of being intellectually cold. Reporter Bernard Shaw opened the debate by asking Dukakis whether he would support the death penalty if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered; Dukakis said "no" and discussed the statistical ineffectiveness of capital punishment. Some commentators thought the question itself was unfair, in that it injected an overly emotional element into the discussion of a policy issue, but many observers felt Dukakis's answer lacked the normal emotions one would expect of a person talking about a loved one's rape and murder.
NOV 2, 2018
How the Willie Horton Ad Played on Racism and Fear
The attack ad demonized prison furloughs. But did it motivate voters in the 1988 presidential campaign between George Bush and Michael Dukakis?

A striking portrait hung on the wall of the campaign headquarters for George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential run. It wasn’t a slick painting of the vice-president, who hoped to become the next Republican in the White House. Rather, it was a mug shot, a grainy photo of a black man with an Afro and a beard.

willie-horton-ad_bush_dukakis_ap_091130032286.webp

The man was William Horton, an escaped convict from Massachusetts who had been serving time for murder when he skipped out on a temporary furlough from prison and committed robbery, rape, and assault. Horton had never met Bush, but he was about to become the vice-president’s most powerful political weapon.

During the 1988 presidential election, Horton became a central figure in Bush’s campaign and a way for the candidate to imply that his opponent, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, was soft on crime. His case stoked a debate on whether criminals should be allowed temporary furloughs from prison. When a political action committee used Horton’s mug shot in an attack ad, he became part of an infamous election-season strategy to stoke fear and racial anxiety among white voters.
[...]
At the time, it was common for federal and state prisons to grant eligible inmates brief furloughs—usually for good behavior and depending on other factors like the amount of time they had served. Criminologists and corrections officers alike approved of the furlough system, which was believed to ease tension in the prisons.

In 1974, the New York Times reported on “the growing confidence that officials have in the furlough program, which they say has a high rate of success.” By 1988, UPI reported, one in ten state and federal prisoners had taken a leave from prison within the last year, and the majority of states and the federal government allowed prisoners who were serving life terms to leave prison temporarily.

The vast majority of inmates did not violate the terms of their furlough and returned to prison to serve more time. But when Horton was given a furlough in June 1986, he didn’t go back.

“I did something stupid,” Horton told The Marshall Project in 2015. He had been driving his nephew’s car without a license when he was pulled over. Instead of surrendering to police, he crashed the car and escaped, fleeing to Florida, then Baltimore.

In April 1987, he was arrested and convicted for entering a suburban Maryland home, attacking and tying up the male homeowner, raping the homeowner’s fiancée multiple times, and driving away with stolen goods.

To many who heard about Horton’s case on the news, his story was an example of how Massachusetts hadn’t been tough enough on its prison population. Why was a convicted murderer on the streets to begin with?
Al Gore, who vied for a spot on the Democratic ticket in 1988, had the same question. In a televised debate, he asked Michael Dukakis, then serving as governor of Massachusetts, a pointed question about Horton. The question, seen as a last-minute gambit for some political leverage, didn’t prevent Dukakis from securing the nomination.

But it did perk up the ears of Republican strategists. They, like Gore, knew that Dukakis had vetoed a bill that would have kept prisoners with first-degree murder convictions from getting furloughs. And they seized on the issue as a way to discredit their Democratic opponent.

“By the time we’re finished,” said Lee Atwater, who managed Bush’s campaign, “they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.”


willie-horton-getty-534178152.webp

Full story [worth reading]:
So, basically nice guy lost to Satanist who never stopped spouting his moral integrity - watch the clip from Bush's inaugural address in the article and try not to puke. Transcript:
America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the Nation and gentler the face of the world. My friends, we have work to do. There are the homeless, lost and roaming. There are the children who have nothing, no love and no normalcy. There are those who cannot free themselves of enslavement to whatever addiction -- drugs, welfare, the demoralization that rules the slums. There is crime to be conquered, the rough crime of the streets. There are young women to be helped who are about to become mothers of children they can't care for and might not love. They need our care, our guidance, and our education, though we bless them for choosing life.

The old solution, the old way, was to think that public money alone could end these problems. But we have learned that that is not so. And in any case, our funds are low. We have a deficit to bring down. We have more will than wallet, but will is what we need. We will make the hard choices, looking at what we have and perhaps allocating it differently, making our decisions based on honest need and prudent safety. And then we will do the wisest thing of all. We will turn to the only resource we have that in times of need always grows: the goodness and the courage of the American people.
And that racist tactic hasn't lost its relevance 30 years later:
This is the 30-year-old Willie Horton ad everybody is talking about today

(CNN)There are attack ads, and then there are Willie Horton-type attack ads.

It's a name given to political advertisements that blatantly stoke racial fears and stereotypes. They're a tried-and-true way to paint a political opponent as being soft on crime. And a lot of time they work.

President Trump is hoping that he gets similar results for a web video, produced for his campaign, that he tweeted out Wednesday. Many are already calling it the most racist national political ad to come out in 30 years -- since Willie Horton.
[...]

The current Trump ad

The new ad from the Trump campaign features Luis Bracamontes, a Mexican man who had previously been deported but returned to the United States and was convicted in February in the slaying of two California deputies.

"I'm going to kill more cops soon," a grinning Bracamontes is shown saying in court as captions flash across the screen reading, "Democrats let him into our country. Democrats let him stay."

CNN's Stephen Collinson contributed to this report.

When it comes to race, Trump is always BAD, whereas Biden and the Demorats are always GOOD. Fortunately, not everyone's buying what's being served up - not even the blacks. Case in point, the documentary Uncle Tom:
In a collection of intimate interviews with some of America's most provocative black conservative thinkers, Uncle Tom takes a unique look at being black in America. Featuring media personalities, ministers, civil rights activists, veterans, and a self-employed plumber, the film explores their personal journeys of navigating the world as one of America's most misunderstood political and cultural groups: The American Black Conservative.
This eye-opening film from Director Justin Malone examines self-empowerment, individualism and rejecting the victim narrative. Uncle Tom shows us a different perspective of American History from this often ignored and ridiculed group.
And Trump continues to be wrong about COVID, according to the MSM, even when he's right.

So FEAR and racism is being used again to manipulate the electorate i.e. mask-wearing sheep, to win an election by hook or by crook. Will the SHTF before November comes?

I guess we'll know the tide has really turned when enough people rip those damn things off their faces.
 
The French Covid-19 detection teams were out in force setting up a testing Tents site's in Tarbes.
Signs littered the outer perimeters like the advertising for the traveling circus.

1600757771360.jpeg

Now the possible false positives will drive the governments numbers and their need to consider further draconian agendas.


Of course FR.24 politicized the fear using Trump as the scapegoat in the process (as to China).

22/09/2020 - 05:53
The 200,000 death mark is about to be crossed in the United States, where the coronavirus kills four times more proportionally than in Europe. For his part, the British Prime Minister must confirm Tuesday that "pubs, bars and restaurants will have to close at 10 pm from Thursday" in England.

The Covid-19 pandemic has killed more than 961,500 people around the world since the end of December, according to the latest figures from Monday, September 21. More than 31.1 million cases have been recorded, of which at least 21 million have been cured.

Nearly six weeks before the American presidential election, the official toll of the Covid-19 pandemic was close to 200,000 dead in the United States. It is the most bereaved country (199,815 deaths Tuesday at 03 am GMT). Next come Brazil (137,272 dead), India (87,882), Mexico (73,493) and the United Kingdom (41,759).

 
Last edited:
I was just thinking that the ongoing fearmongering about Corona and the new "hotspots" breaking out on so many places of the globe here and there (with the accompanying tyrannical rules) might at least partly be designed to make the population more eager and willing to accept (or even demand) a vaccine in order for things to "come back to normal" since quite many people are getting rather fed up with all the arbitrary restrictions and rules that are also getting ever more confusing. I guess many people would just like to go on with their lives as before, with the least amount of restrictions possible and the PTB might be playing exactly on that need/longing in order to make the vaccine even more appealing. Sort of like instilling thinking like the following:

"Just get it over with please and give us the vaccine so that we can go back to normal".

That of course will also create even more pressure from the normal population toward those who refuse the vaccine "because they are to blame" when things then still are not going back to normal.
 
C.A. said:
France also recorded 123 deaths in a single day, a record high since May when the country was first coming out of lockdown and cases were decreasing.

This "record" number of deaths for the 18th of September is bogus. It is due at best to a statistical mistake, at worst to sheer fraud:

A hospital in Essonne transmitted this Friday nearly 240 files concerning patients hospitalized in recent months. “As a result, the hospital indicators for September 18, 2020, presented by date of declaration, show a sudden increase in this department. This impact is also visible at a regional and national level ” [...] Today's figures are therefore largely distorted. According to the Ministry of Health, this is a "catching up of data" concerning "237 admissions files including 76 deaths" recorded ... until the 29th week of the year, that of July 19 ! By subtracting this impromptu addition to the real victims, we therefore obtain 47 additional deaths, which seems more realistic compared to the day before.
Source in French
 
Here's another indication that any fines or charges issued under the current directives in Victoria may be overturned or dismissed. Things are heating up. If Judges and QC's are indicating that they won't support the bill then I wonder what the police will do. Will they keep enforcing measures knowing that they're wasting their time?

Coronavirus: Judges, QCs call on Daniel Andrews to drop ‘COVID-19 Omnibus’ bill

Here's the letter:

“We are deeply concerned by the passage of the COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) and Other Acts Amendment Bill 2020 (Bill) through the Legislative Assembly.

Emergency powers already allow authorised officers under the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 (Vic) to detain people and to restrict movement.

The Bill would expand the emergency powers to allow an authorised officer to detain:

• any person that the authorised officer reasonably believes is likely to fail to comply with an emergency direction and is a close contact of a person diagnosed with COVID-19 (or a person diagnosed with COVID-19) not given clearance from self-isolation;

• for so long as the authorised officer reasonably believes the person in detention is likely to fail to comply with an emergency direction.

The Bill would also allow any person the Secretary considered appropriate to be authorised to exercise emergency powers. There would be no requirement that persons authorised be police officers, or even public servants.

Authorising citizens to detain their fellow citizens on the basis of a belief that the detained person is unlikely to comply with emergency directions by the “authorised” citizens is unprecedented, excessive and open to abuse.

We call on the Legislative Council to amend the Bill, or to vote against it.
 
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