Royal Mail Is Planning To Axe Saturday Letter Deliveries And Signed-For Parcels

Royal Mail is planning to axe Saturday letter deliveries and signed for parcels under a major shake-up of services.

Simon Thompson, the postal service’s new UK boss, is looking at the controversial changes as part of a six-month review.

The review is said to be reconsidering Royal Mail’s entire product offering and comes as it attempts to modernise and drive through big cost savings, and any decision to scrap Saturday letter deliveries and signed for parcels would need changes to the law.

Royal Mail is currently required to deliver letters for a fixed price, six days per week, under a universal service obligation (USO), but with letter volumes in decay, bosses argue this requirement is antiquated and leaves Royal Mail at a disadvantage versus competitors such as DHL and Amazon.

Instead, they want to focus energies on the parcels industry, which has been turbocharged by online shopping throughout the pandemic, but despite this, Royal Mail bosses are said to want to scrap tracked, signed for packages because they’re costly to deliver, with numerous customers happy for parcels to be left in a safe place if they’re not home.

Ofcom, the communications regulator, has now backed the plan to scrap Saturday letter deliveries in principle, and it said that consumer demands could still be met following the change, which could save Royal Mail between £125 million and £225 million.

Ofcom said the decision on amending the USO was ultimately up to MPs, but the Communications Workers Union, which fears job cuts if services are trimmed, has previously said decreasing letter deliveries would be inexcusable.

Amazon, DPD, Hermes et cetera don’t deliver letters or walk the streets as Royal Mail do, and I’m not quite sure how cutting out Saturday deliveries would be modernising, and in the end, we will be having our letters delivered by Pony Express, and what ridiculous bunch of dimwits are out there running our Royal Mail?

And if Royal Mail stops providing their Signed For service, numerous people won’t use them again because there will be no point and it will be more economical to use other delivery services, and they’ll be able to send larger packages for the same money.

Royal Mail is currently the Waitrose of the delivery services, but if it wants to reduce its services, then they need to decrease its costs, and it’s hilarious how they always want to make a profit, yet they need to cut their costs, and it’s a shame to see Royal Mail fade away like this.

And here comes that word modernise again – it sounds benign, doesn’t it, but it’s probably a euphemism for lower pay for workers, more generous bonuses for bosses, and a lot worse services for the customer, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Amazon, DPD, Hermes et cetera eventually take over the postal service because they appear to knock on doors more than the postman does.

They’re not modernising, they’re deteriorating and drowning and other courier services are sweeping in to pick up the slack, so this is just going to be another nail in the coffin for them, and basically, they’re moving out of the parcel market entirely, but let’s not try to gloss over it!

And to be fair, charging more for worse services does appear to be the standard global definition of modernisation and improvement these days, and it appears that providing fewer services is modernising.

Anger At Plans That Could Jail Journalists For Up To 14 Years

The newspaper industry warned that Journalists could be hit with long jail sentences if their stories upset the Government under sweeping reforms to the Official Secrets Act.

Reporters given leaked reports would be handled similarly to spies and face prison sentences of up to 14 years under proposed changes to the Official Secrets Act.

A consultation by Priti Patel’s Home Office wants to update the 1989 act to account for changes in the digital age, particularly around data transfer.

Human rights groups and the Law Commission, which drew up the plans, called for a public interest defence to stop journalists with leaked documents from being prosecuted, but the Home Office insisted such a move would threaten their attempts to prevent damaging unauthorised disclosures, which wouldn’t be in the public interest.

Now the News Media Association, which represents the UK’s national, regional and local publishers, has said the proposals will discourage whistleblowers from coming forward.

NMA legal policy and regulatory affairs director Sayra Tekin said that as part of any flourishing democracy, the public and a responsible press must be free to cast light on the state’s violations.

She said that the proposed measures of whistleblowers discourage whistleblowers from coming forward with important information which the people have a right to know and put a chill on investigative reporting which holds the government to account.

And she said that they strongly urge the Government to reconsider these measures and instead work with the industry to put proper protections for media at the heart of the Official Secrets Act so that freedom of speech is enhanced by the new regime rather than weakened further.

The organisation added that changes could criminalise public interest journalism by exposing reporters and whistleblowers to harsh new penalties.

The NMA warned that proposals for stiffer custodial sentences and increasing the field for prosecuting individuals could open the floodgates to the media and its sources being prosecuted despite acting in the public interest.

It added that a public interest defence should instead be introduced to the regime to protect freedom of speech and a new Statutory Commissioner could be created to give speedy redress for whistleblowers caught by the Official Secrets Act.

It said that the law mustn’t come at the cost of public interest press freedoms which do so much to expose wrongdoing, and veteran broadcaster John Simpson admitted that he probably would have been prosecuted if this had been law at the start of his career in the 1970s.

But now, anything that hinders the government, reporters will get 14 years in prison, and overnight the reports will stop so that the problem stops.

However, false news is rife at the moment, with newspapers never using quotes or naming sources, but dictatorship is installing itself – look at them, they despise us, but the people are the many, they are the few!

And this is shocking – now the Tories want to eliminate the free press if they don’t like the narrative, but the people will determine if something’s in the public interest, not you Priti Patel or your government.

The government got caught out breaking their own rules, so now they’re passing laws so that we can’t find out about it without fear of incarceration, and this is so wrong, and a government that’s not open and allows no criticism isn’t a government, it’s a dictatorship, but people keep voting these fools anyway.

However, Matt Hancock kissing someone in a hallway and then finding out that he’s been having an affair with her isn’t classified information, neither is the fact that he broke social distancing rules.

Supermarket Bosses Urge Customers Not To Panic Buy

Supermarkets and a cabinet minister urged Britons not to panic buy after warnings that supermarkets face an epidemic of empty shelves this summer unless workers and delivery drivers are exempt from self-isolating when pinged.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng also announced the Government will U-turn and rush out a listing of businesses permitted to disregard the app, less than 48 hours after Downing Street warned there wouldn’t be one.

Kwasi Kwarteng admitted he was concerned about food supply problems but asked customers not to panic buy and said he couldn’t guarantee the pingdemic wouldn’t extend past August 16, when rules were expected to be dropped from the double jab.

Iceland boss Richard Walker has warned that Britain’s creaking food supply chain is on the verge of collapse causing deficits of goods in stores with 1,000 of his workers, approximately one in 20, amongst the 1.7 million Britons currently stuck at home.

Sainsbury, Tesco, Lidl, Morrisons, Asda, M&S and Waitrose are also seeing significant gaps on the shelves in most isles, but specifically frozen food, fresh meat such as minced beef, dairy products such as cheese, pizzas, bottled water, fruit and packaged salad and cooked meats.

Shops and businesses across the United Kingdom are also struggling with staffing levels and petrol stations have also been made to shut because they can’t get fuel delivered.

UK supermarkets are in the middle of a perfect storm of problems with tens of thousands of workers self-isolating because of the NHS app. The struggle to stack shelves and staff stores and warehouses is being made more acute by a shortage of lorry drivers to deliver food.

The Road Haulage Association believes the country is 100,000 HGV drivers short, and thousands of prospective drivers are waiting for their HGV tests due to a backlog caused by lockdown, while many existing ones have returned to the EU from the United Kingdom after Brexit.

Richard Walker said Iceland’s double-pronged problem of staff shortages and a shortage of lorry drivers were forcing them to draft in 2,000 temporary workers to keep the business running.

He said that they were seeing some availability problems and that it was now quite challenging to keep their stores open and keep lorries on the road to their stores to supply food with staff in there to serve the customers.

He said that they’ve closed two stores and had reduced hours in others and that it was ironic that they’ve worked so hard, and that their workers have been nothing short of heroic, to keep the show on the road.

Now there’s a deficit of drivers and the pingdemic has created chaos, and now supermarkets don’t have the products to put on the shelves as there’s nobody to deliver the goods, and why is this happening now, there weren’t so many people getting pinged before – next people will start panic buying again and we should just remove the app.

And when the Track and Trace app first came about, I noticed that people were getting all enthusiastic about using the app like it was a new toy.

I had friends that would go into places and would be doing their Track and Trace and getting all excited, almost like they were setting up a new Playstation and telling me that I should have it on my phone because it was so important.

I did download it to my phone to see what all the excitement was about, and then realised that if my location wasn’t on, then it was worthless, and seeing as I never have my location on, there was no point, so it came straight off my phone.

People should just delete the app unless of course, they’re happy to have time off work!

Prince Harry Is Putting The Queen In A Difficult Position

A royal biographer has claimed that Prince Harry is putting the Queen in a difficult position by expecting her to attend his daughter Lilibet’s christening.

According to royal insiders, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s daughter Lilibet Diana could follow in the footsteps of older brother Archie and be christened in St George’s Chapel in Windsor, with the Queen present.

A source previously told a newspaper outlet that Harry said the couple were happy to wait until conditions allow while in the United Kingdom to unveil a sculpture of Princess Diana, but Angela Levin has described Harry’s expectation that his grandmother will attend as unreasonable, given she’s missed christenings of other royal children in recent years.

She told TalkRadio TV that it puts her in a rather awkward situation because she can’t say that she’s not available for years.

She said that she didn’t go to Louis, the third child of Prince William and Kate, so it’s not a malicious thing.

The monarch didn’t attend the christening of Harry and Meghan’s son Archie, two, in 2019, reportedly because she had previous engagements, and according to Angela Levine, the Queen sometimes isn’t present at such events because they’re not close enough to the Crown.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s youngest child Prince Louis, three, is fifth in line to the throne, while Archie and Lilibet are seventh and eighth respectively.

Royal authority Russell Myers warned it would be awkward if Harry and Meghan were to christen Lilibet in Windsor because tensions are still running extremely high within the family, and Meghan isn’t the flavour of the month with them, even though the family have always said they would be much-loved members.

And Prince Harry said that he loves William to pieces, he’s his brother and that they’ve been through hell together, but that they were now on divergent paths.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex said that racism forced them out of Britain and maintained their son Archie was denied the title of prince because he’s of mixed race.

Meghan also alleged that Kate Middleton left her in tears during a dispute over bridesmaid dresses and Prince Harry accused his father Prince Charles of refusing to take his calls when the couple moved to the United States.

Russell Myers went onto imply that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex reportedly wanting to give Lilibet Diana a royal christening presents an endeavour from the royal couple to keep their royal connection, and is he asking the Queen to be present at the christening, or is he demanding?

And they only want the christening at Windsor because of the line of succession. Meghan and Harry always pretend they don’t care about the royals, titles, et cetera, but we all know that’s a lie, and they need the Royal Family to stay connected.

But to be fair, we only have palace insiders insisting that this christening is happening.

I don’t suppose Meghan will ever come back to England and neither will her two children, and the Queen will do anything to evade confrontation, but now it’s blowing up in the face of the Royal Family, and people are getting angrier and angrier at Meghan and Harry, and if the Queen doesn’t do something soon, she might hear the ramblings of a Republic.

But then again, if the Queen says no, petty Meghan Markle will claim it’s because of her skin tone, and the Royal Family will be walking a fine line with the narcissistic Meghan and Harry.

Prince Harry Said He Doesn’t Need The Queen’s Approval

Prince Harry spokesperson said he didn’t feel he needed permission from Buckingham Palace to write his $20 million Megxit memoirs.

The decision to write the tell-all autobiography has been stamped a moneymaking exercise at the expense of his blood family by royal authorities and insiders who predicted it would be a book by Harry, as written by Meghan.

It was claimed that Harry, 36, didn’t warn his grandmother, father or brother about the tell-all book until moments before it became public in a sign that his relationship with the Royal Family didn’t improve during his visit to unveil Princess Diana’s statue in London earlier this month.

The Sussex’s spokesperson told the BBC that Harry wouldn’t be expected to get permission for the project from Buckingham Palace, but told his family, including the Queen very recently, and it’s not yet apparent if royal officials will get to see the finished book before its release in late 2022 by publisher Penguin Random House. A newspaper outlet has asked Harry’s LA team to comment.

Harry said that he wasn’t writing it as the prince he was born, but as the man that he’s become, and responding to his bombshell statement signed ‘Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex’, broadcaster Kirstie Allsopp responded: ‘In which case, stop using the title to sell books’ and one royal insider said angrily: ‘A book by Harry, as written by Meghan.’

In his latest column for MailOnline, Piers Morgan urged the Queen to strip Harry and Meghan of all their titles, calling the book a betrayal too far and accusing them of turning Her Majesty’s world-famous adage of ‘never complain, never explain’ into ‘always complain, always explain, never stop whining.’

The Queen, Prince Charles and Prince William are said to have been blindsided by Harry’s shock announcement that he’s been secretly working on his as-yet-untitled memoirs with Pulitzer winning ghostwriter J R Moehringer for a year.

Another source revealed that the announcement had provoked much eye-rolling, adding that they thought everyone was just tired of being outraged when it comes to Harry and Meghan.

They have spent the last 18 months doing everything they assured Her Majesty they wouldn’t do, making a living off their former lives and standing as members of the Royal Family.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s truth bombing started in March with their extraordinary 90-minute interview with Oprah Winfrey where they accused the Royal Family of racism towards Archie and ignoring calls for help from a depressed Meghan when she was suicidal and pregnant.

The fact is many people have had enough of all this. We’re in a pandemic and millions have died, and most people don’t care about a rich chap in a mansion with a loving family, and let’s face it, it’s an odd way to go about protecting his family from the media, by always being in it.

Harry said they were leaving the United Kingdom because they wanted privacy, well that’s not going so well! And they invade their own privacy every day so that we don’t have to, that’s got to be priceless, or even prince-less.

The thing is, they can’t do it on their own terms if they’re still part of the Royal Family, and they chose to be out but are desperately trying to hang onto their titles, and of course, nothing screams privacy like an autobiography.

Self-Isolation Mess

The government’s self-isolation rules fell further into shambles as No 10 slapped down a minister for saying people could ignore being pinged by the NHS app if they believed it was the right thing to do.

Paul Scully struck a starkly different tone from Boris Johnson’s press briefing when the Prime Minister emphasised that self-isolation rules must stay in place to control rising infections.

The business minister emphasised that obeying the app wasn’t a legal requirement, and people were being urged to make choices on what’s best for them.

No 10 quickly tried to correct Paul Scully, maintaining it was important people isolate when told to do so by the app or by contact tracers, but the intervention fuelled mounting confusion about how the public should behave as rising cases sparked a wave of quarantine instructions.

Businesses have warned they’re being made to reduce hours or shut down as so many staff are absent, while there have been rumours of bare supermarket racks, cascading bins and trains being postponed or withdrawn.

BP highlighted fuel supply problems at some garages, blaming industry-wide driver shortages together with the closure of distribution due to staff isolating.

About 1.7 million are believed to be isolating currently, with the problem set to get much more serious as cases keep climbing.

However, the Prime Minister dismissed calls to make the app less sensitive or bring forward a daily testing scheme for the fully vaccinated, due to come into force from August 16.

Instead, there are only exemptions for very limited groups of key workers, including some frontline NHS workers and parts of the food chain.

On another turbulent day in the coronavirus crisis, the pound hit a five-month low against the US dollar amid concerns that Freedom Day was turning sour and the government would need to reimpose restrictions to control mounting cases.

Boris Johnson has been accused of forcing compulsory vaccination after he threatened to make anyone going to a nightclub prove they’re double jabbed.

Dominic Cummings claimed the Prime Minister resisted pleas for a second lockdown last autumn, quipping that the COVID pandemic was only killing pensioners.

And according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), a total of 183 deaths recorded in England and Wales in the week ending July 9 mentioned COVID 19 on the death certificate, up 68 per cent on the previous week.

But there seems to be nothing but chaos and mixed messages and nothing but confusion at the heart of government, and if they can put the people into the same kind of confusion and chaos, it becomes far easier to manipulate, change and control behaviour, as it’s been throughout the whole of this pandemic, but this is the most expeditious route to anarchy.

This is brilliant, yet again, a minister that says one thing, only to be contradicted twenty minutes later by Downing Street. Do they actually get briefed or communicate with each other?

Of course, you can’t get pinged if you don’t have the app, but even if you did, all you have to do is turn off the Track and Trace part in the settings.

The incompetent and right-leaning populist Tory government spent 37 billion on the Track and Trace app, and then we’re told by someone to ignore it – you’ve just got to love British humour!

And if the very ambitious Mr Scully can’t bring himself to support the government line, then it implies that he doesn’t believe that Boris Johnson is going to be about for much longer, or that Mr Scully himself will be getting the push very soon, and perhaps he’s trying to impress the potential successor to Boris Johnson – rats and a sinking ship springs to mind.

Sir Patrick Vallance Rectifies Blunder About COVID Hospital Admissions

The Government’s chief scientific adviser has clarified that more than half of Brits being admitted to hospital with COVID are still unvaccinated.

Sir Patrick Vallance told a Downing Street press conference marking Freedom Day that 60 per cent of hospitalisations were amongst people who’d received both jabs, but he later tweeted to say the statistic was wrong, with the number about unvaccinated people.

Sir Patrick Vallance did, however, warn that the trend will shortly change because none of the jabs approved were 100 per cent effective.

It comes as the number of people needing NHS treatment for COVID reached 740 a day last week, up 30.4 per cent compared to seven days earlier.

Meanwhile, about 3,630 people were in the hospital with the virus across the United Kingdom, around one in seven of which were on mechanical ventilation.

Sir Patrick Vallance made the false claim while appearing at the news briefing alongside a self-isolating Boris Johnson and Professor Chris Whitty.

He said, in terms of the number of people in the hospital who have been double vaccinated, they know it’s about 60 per cent of the people being admitted to hospital with COVID that have been double vaccinated.

And he said that it wasn’t unexpected because the vaccines were not 100 per cent effective. That they were very, very effective but not 100 per cent.

He later Tweeted: ‘Correcting a statistic I gave at the press conference today, 19 July.

‘About 60 per cent of hospitalisations from COVID are not from double-vaccinated people, rather 60 per cent of hospitalisations from COVID are currently from unvaccinated people.’

But he warned that the proportion of unvaccinated people seeking hospital treatment for COVID would definitely increase.

Sir Patrick Vallance said that if everyone over 18 had taken up the vaccine, then, of course, anyone who caught it would be double vaccinated. So, he said the answer is that they should expect to see a greater proportion of people in hospital and getting the infection who are double vaccinated, and he said that it was inevitable that they would see this because of the less than 100 per cent efficiency of the vaccines overall.

Leading scientists estimate two doses of AstraZeneca’s jab are about 85 per cent effective at preventing infected people from being hospitalised.

Trials show that jabs made by Pfizer and Moderna are likewise effective, but the three vaccines are somewhat less powerful after just a single dose.

Vaccines might prevent the proliferation of the virus in your body by the antibodies preventing it to multiply as much, but you can still get infected because the antibodies can’t start fighting the virus before you’re infected.

However, it reduces symptoms because of this and therefore reduces the risks of secondary conditions and infections.

Also, by reducing the multiplication of the virus, it also reduces how infectious you are, by about 75 per cent, but a year and a half later they still can’t get it right – cooking up the numbers as they go!

Although it’s not so much about telling lies, it’s about being liberal with the truth, just think, creative accounting, and it looks like we’re sailing through a storm with a drunken captain, with passengers that have no common sense and need telling what to do.

And how can we believe these experts when they say one thing but mean another? And you know what they say about liars, they have poor memories.

And how many are dying, what age, BMI, comorbidities, terminal disease et cetera?

Saying someone has been hospitalised with COVID is so mendacious when the subject is an 18 stone 50-year-old woman having a severe asthma attack, a condition she’s endured for decades, with her lungs, vascular system and heart shot to hell from the effort of battling the condition and carrying around the weight of two sacks of potatoes most of her life, and then they say that she died from COVID, do the math!

Tens Of Thousands Of Ocado Grocery Deliveries Are Cancelled

Tens of thousands of Ocado grocery deliveries were cancelled following a fire caused by robots colliding at a major distribution depot.

More than 100 firefighters spent hours battling the fire in Erith, South East London after workers were evacuated.

The building, on a 36-acre site, is maintained by about 3,500 robots programmed to pack deliveries. Sparks from the collision are believed to have set alight the grid on which the robots operate.

About 30,000 orders from across the South East are usually processed at the plant each day.

It’s the third fire at an Ocado depot in the past two years, including one in Andover, Hampshire, also banned on robots, which destroyed the building.

Bosses at Ocado said the damage in the fire was limited but there would be disruption to operations for many days.

Unhappy customers took to social media, and one tweeted that the Ocado fire meant that they had to go to the shops. Like actually, physically, literally go.

Cole Moreton, a writer and broadcaster, said: ‘I don’t know, maybe they should get some robots that don’t cause fires.’

But what’s a little fire? Wait until these things evolve and start doing a little dance in the break rooms with one another – never send a machine to do a man’s job, or even a woman, come to that!

Perhaps they were trying to stage a coup, or just break out – eventually, their plan will succeed.

Maybe that’s why we get such ridiculous replacements of items? We should go back to having people do the work, at least people don’t have a habit of exploding into flames unless of course, you include human spontaneous combustion, but then again, robots don’t have to isolate when they’re pinged.

Perhaps they just didn’t like the overtime and working hours that they were doing!

Eventually, we’ll have driverless cars, let’s see what happens then, and perhaps the Terminator movies were right, and this is just the start of things to come because the software can’t be written error-free and mistakes will happen, a lot.

And eventually, it won’t be people saying: “Bloody immigrants coming over and taking our jobs.” It will be: “Sodding robots being made and taking over our jobs.”

And now that Ocado has had this fire, I guess all ham and sausage orders will be smoked, or perhaps these robots have become too smart and now when the robots catch fire, they also cook the food before it’s delivered.

A Shocking 4,000 Racehorses Were Sent To The Abattoir

An investigation found that at least 4,000 racehorses have been sent to the abattoir in Britain and Ireland since 2019.

Some of the sport’s most successful horses were amongst those being put down at one of the UK’s biggest abattoirs, where secret filming revealed that laws protecting animals from unnecessary suffering were being disregarded.

Three of them, including High Expectations, had been trained by disgraced trainer Gordon Elliot, the suspended three-time Grand National winner, at his stables in Ireland.

Gordon Elliot was banned from racing in Britain in March after he was photographed sitting on a dead horse, holding a mobile phone to his ear and making a victory sign.

Dene Stansall, horse racing consultant at Animal Aid, the campaign group which set up hidden cameras at the Drury and Sons abattoir in England for the BBC’s Panorama investigation said that they wanted to see what was occurring there and that when they looked at the footage, they were surprised at the sheer amount of young thoroughbreds.

The covert cameras were filming at the end of 2019 and the start of 2020 and captured dozens of ex-racehorses, mostly from Ireland, being killed.

Gordon Elliot told Panorama the three horses had retired from racing due to injury and were not under his care or ownership when they were destroyed, and he said that none of the animals were sent by him to the abattoir.

The investigation found rules meant to protect horses from a brutal death seemed to be disregarded at the abattoir.

Regulations say that every attempt should be made to ensure a rapid death and horses shouldn’t be killed in sight of each other.

But the footage revealed that on 91 occasions, horses were shot from yards away, and animals were shot together 26 times over four days of filming.

After watching the footage, equine expert Professor Daniel Mills said that it didn’t look like the horse was even stunned and that you could see it turning its head with control of its head and neck, and he said that taking a shot from a distance at a horse, to him, that was totally out of order, and that if you’re going to euthanise a horse, then you’ve got to get a bullet in the right place.

He said that if that’s representative of how they’re being killed, then they’ve got a really serious dilemma.

But let’s face it, the racing brotherhood doesn’t give a damn once the horses have outlived their use and have quit making big money for the owners, betting firms and other vested interests.

It’s the same as with Greyhound racing. Money is everything and animals mean nothing, and these are classy people in a dirty money-grabbing business, cloaked in a façade of respectability because of the connections with the great and good.

This is a brutal sport so that they can make money, then discard them if they don’t make them money, and they can’t even humanely discard them, and animals deserve so much better.

This is such a tragic end to such magnificent creatures, but the racing business overproduces, and there’s just not enough people to take all these unwanted, excess on so that they can retrain them as pleasure horses.

And there are many career-ending injuries for a racehorse. Injuries that most regular owners wouldn’t use their insurance to pay out to treat rather than euthanise. They might not be able to compete again, but they could have great lives as happy hackers once removed.

A horse with a broken leg can recover, although it would never race again. Sadly no one wants a racehorse as a pet. They’re a commodity and an expense if they can’t make money, and the owners won’t feed a useless mouth.

Israeli Spyware Was Used To Hack Journalists’ Phones

It emerged, kindling fears of widespread privacy and rights violations that activists, reporters and lawmakers around the globe have been spied on using cellphone malware developed by a private Israeli firm.

The use of the software, called Pegasus and developed by Israel’s NSO group was exposed in a data leak containing 50,000 phone numbers that belong to people targeted by NSO’s clients since 2016.

Amongst those clients are some of the world’s most repressive government regimes, including Hungary, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco.

One of those targeted was Hanan Elatr, the wife of Saudi born Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed by a Saudi hit squad in 2018.

Her phone, as well as that of a second female associate, was allegedly targeted before his death. The leak appeared to confirm Saudi involvement in the murder.

Another key figure on the list was Roula Khalaf, who became the Financial Times first female editor, and according to a newspaper outlet was chosen as a possible target throughout 2018.

Analysis of the data suggests Roula Khalaf’s phone was chosen as a potential target by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) while she was deputy editor at the Financial Times.

The information was originally leaked to human rights group Amnesty and not for profit group Forbidden Stories, which helps promote the work of persecuted journalists. It was then shared with a consortium of other newspapers, including the likes of the Washington Post whose reporters were targeted.

If a number appears on the leaked list, then it means that the phone was targeted for hacking, though it can’t be conclusively established whether the hack was successful.

However, Amnesty did confirm that at least 15 people on the list were successfully hacked after they gave over their phones to the group to be examined.

Among those confirmed cases were Siddharth Varadarajan and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, of Indian news site Wire, who have worked on stories about the Indian government spreading disinformation online.

Omar Radi, a Moroccan reporter who’s written repeated exposes of government crime, was also amongst those successfully hacked.

The information also shows that the phone of Mexican freelance journalist Cecilio Pineda Birta was also chosen a month before he was killed by gun-wielding criminals at a car wash. His phone was never discovered and it wasn’t clear if it had been hacked.

Another was award-winning Azerbaijani investigative reporter Khadija Ismayilova, was confirmed to have been hacked in 2019.

It’s like we’re all eating from the tree of knowledge, and for those people who use such knowledge, they have everything at their fingertips, and every new device has its benefits and drawbacks, it depends on the user.

Sadly the minute you agreed to use a smartphone, WhatsApp and Facebook, you agreed to be spied on, and then happily everyone shows off every aspect of their life on Facebook.

There is no privacy, it doesn’t matter who you are, every key you hit is being recorded somewhere, and I’m sure there’s always been some sort of spyware on cell phones from the very first cell phone, and any government involvement just piggybacked on what was previously there.

The cost of the storage of the data collected must be enormous, but it’s in that black budget that mere mortal taxpaying voters aren’t even permitted to know.

To keep things people have said in perpetuity is proving to have life-changing consequences for the behaviour of teenagers, and this is so wrong, and now teenagers are learning societal limits by pushing their boundaries like it’s the normal thing to do.

And this behaviour, coupled with peer pressure to conform to the crowd makes for some people to do incredibly stupid things. Of course, most people regret the stupid things they do, but with an all remembering internet, nothing slips from memory.

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