From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

With 30 nations enrolled, the UN and Gates Foundation’s digital ID campaign signals accelerating efforts to create a global digital infrastructure that centralizes identity and data.

The 50-in-5 campaign to accelerate digital ID, fast payment systems, and data exchanges in 50 countries by 2028 reaches a 30 country milestone.

Launched in November 2023, the 50-in-5 campaign is a joint effort of the United Nations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and their partners to rollout out at least one component of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) in 50 nations within five years.

DPI is a civic technology stack consisting of three major components: digital ID, fast payment systems, and massive data sharing between public and private entities.

30 countries have now joined the UN/Gates 50-in-5 DPI campaign to rollout Digital ID, Fast Payment Systems & Massive Data Exchanges between public & private entities https://t.co/dOYCfQHObt pic.twitter.com/yP6V7zxnUD

— Tim Hinchliffe (@TimHinchliffe) October 2, 2025

50-in-5 started with 11 first-mover countries, and with the count now at 30 the participating countries include:

Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, Estonia, Ethiopia, France, Guatemala, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Lesotho, Malawi, Mexico, Moldova, Nigeria, Norway, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Sri Lanka, South Africa, South Sudan, Somalia, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Ukraine, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, and Zambia.

The 50-in-5 campaign celebrated its 30-country milestone during a sideline event at the U.N. General Assembly in New York on September 22.

There, government officials, like Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, praised the work of 50-in-5 while the ministers of digital economy from Nigeria and Togo called for an interoperable digital identity system for the entire African continent.

Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy Bosun Tijani said that each country could build their own digital identity scheme, but that they should all be interoperable with one another – demonstrating both the digital ID and data sharing as good potential use cases for DPI.

“Nations want to maintain their own ID databases, but I think we have a unique opportunity to apply strong data exchange system interoperability,” said Tijani.

“I think a digital identity system that can go with you wherever you are going on the African continent would be a fantastic example,” he added.

In March 2025, the Nigerian government published a framework to develop national Digital Public Infrastructure that would leverage digital ID to track and trace “key life events” of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.

“Throughout a citizen’s life, from birth to old age, there are marked moments of significant life events requiring support or service from the government,” the paper begins.

“Some of these services include registration of births, antenatal healthcare, vaccines, school enrollment, scholarships, health insurance for business registrations, filing of taxes, etc.”

These “life events” require every citizen to have a digital ID:

The Federal Government of Nigeria is on a mission to appropriately deploy digital technology to support Nigerians through these significant and profound moments so they can integrate into the state and enjoy the benefits of citizenhood from cradle to old age.

Back at the 50-in-5 milestone event, Togo’s Minister of Digital Economy and Transformation Cina Lawson called for a free, cross-border, interoperable digital ID powered by the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP).

MOSIP is a Gates-funded platform that “helps govts & other user organizations implement a digital, foundational identity system.”

Said Lawson, “We’ve initiated conversations with our neighbors, namely Benin, to have interoperability of our ID systems, but also Burkina Faso and other countries such as Senegal, because we’re using MOSIP platform, so what we do is that we host meetings of countries that are interested the platform, so that we could see how we [are] operating it and so on.”

“Our ID system, using the MOSIP platform, is really the ID that the majority of the Togolese will have because first of all it’s free, it doesn’t require to show proof of citizenship, and so on, so that is the ID card of the poorest of the Togolese,” she added.

Togo’s Minister of Digital Economy & Transformation Cina Lawson calls for free, cross-border, interoperable Digital ID using Gates-funded MOSIP platform. UN/Gates 50-in-5 event https://t.co/dOYCfQHObt pic.twitter.com/wPC4vpms9l

— Tim Hinchliffe (@TimHinchliffe) October 2, 2025

Lawson also spoke at the 50-in-5 launch event in November 2023, where she explained that Togo’s DPI journey began with the arrival of COVID-19.

First, the government set up a digital payments system within 10 days.

“We deployed it, and we were able to pay out 25 percent of all Togolese adults, and we distributed $34 million that the most vulnerable Togolese received directly through their mobile phones,” said Lawson.

Then, came vaccine passports.

“We created a digital COVID certificate. All of a sudden, the fight against the pandemic became really about using digital tools to be more effective,” she added at the time.

Today, Togo became the first sub-Saharan African country whose digital COVID-19 vaccination certificate is recognized by the @eu_commission. Travelers with a Togolese certificate will be able to validly present it in the EU & vice versa. @AmbUETogo @KoenDoens pic.twitter.com/Uy9mRF8bkU

— Cina Lawson (@cinalawson) November 24, 2021

To get an idea where DPI is heading, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Myhailo Fedorov gave a pre-recorded speech for the 50-in-5 milestone event, saying that his country was successful in building “the state in a smartphone” via the DIIA app, which had reached 23 million users.

“For every citizen, government should be simple, convenient, nearly invisible, and accessible in just a few clicks,” said Fedorov.

“Today, 23 million people use the DIIA app […] Since the launch of DIIA in 2020, Ukrainians and the state have saved about $4.5 billion to date.”

“This is the combined anti-corruption and economic effect of digitalizing services.”

“For us, it’s powerful proof of DIIA’s efficiency and the real impact of building a digital state,” he added.

Ukraine Deputy PM Mykhailo Fedorov praises DIIA Digital ID app, with 23M users, for being a "STATE IN A SMARTPHONE" & "BUILDING AN (INVISIBLE) DIGITAL STATE." An "ANTI-CORRUPTION/ECONOMIC EFFECT OF DIGITALIZING SERVICES." Includes "ONLINE MARRIAGE" 50-in-5 https://t.co/dOYCfQHObt pic.twitter.com/MUFwbW4Yyy

— Tim Hinchliffe (@TimHinchliffe) October 3, 2025

Speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Technology Governance Summit on April 7, 2021, Fedorov told the panelists of the “Scaling Up Digital Identity Systems” session, that it was Ukraine’s goal to “enable all life situations with this digital ID.”

“The pandemic has accelerated our progress […] People have no choice but to trust technology,” Fedorov said at the time.

“We have to make a product that is so convenient that a person will be able to disrupt their stereotypes, to break through from their fears, and start using a government-made application,” he added.

The 50-in-5 campaign is a collaboration between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations Development Program, the Digital Public Goods Alliance, the Center for Digital Public Infrastructure, and Co-Develop; with support from GovStack, the Inter-American Development Bank, and UNICEF.

The Center for Digital Public Infrastructure is backed by Co-Develop and Nilekani Philanthropies.

Nandan Nilekani is one of the architects of India’s digital identity system, Aadhaar.

Co-Develop was founded by The Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Nilekani Philanthropies, and the Omidyar Network.

The Omidyar Network is a funder of MOSIP.

The Digital Public Goods Alliance lists both the Gates and Rockefeller foundations in its roadmap showcasing “activities that advance digital public goods,” along with other organizations and several governments.

At last year’s Summit of the Future, 193 nations agreed to the non-binding “Pact for the Future,” which dedicates a section in its annex, the “Global Digital Compact,” to implement DPI in member states.

One year later, the U.K. announced it was going to force Britons into mandatory digital ID schemes under the guise of combatting illegal immigration.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

From LifeSiteNews

By Cassy Cooke

After her parents both became seriously ill and her mother wanted to undergo assisted suicide, a Washington woman convinced her father to die also.

Key takeaways

• Corinne Gregory Sharpe spoke to PEOPLE about her experience convincing her parents to undergo assisted suicide together.
• After her mother was diagnosed with aortic stenosis in her 90s, she lived for a few more years before her health began to decline. At that point, she said she wanted to die by assisted suicide.
• Her father did not have a health condition outside of having previously had a stroke; however, he was nervous to live without his wife. Sharpe convinced him of a “solution” – to kill himself alongside her mother.
• Couple assisted suicide has become romanticized by the media.

The details

Corinne Gregory Sharpe spoke with PEOPLE about her efforts to convince her father to undergo assisted suicide alongside her mother. She said her family had always been close, so when her mother became ill, her father was nervous to live without her.

Sharpe’s mother was first diagnosed with aortic stenosis in 2018 at the age of 92 and given less than two years to live if she did not undergo surgery.

“And even if she had the procedure, there was no guarantee that she was gonna live any longer,” Sharpe said. “So her attitude was sort of like, well, let’s just kind of let things go as they go.”

READ: Colorado gave over 500 people assisted suicide drugs solely for eating disorders in 2024

But Sharpe’s mother didn’t die within those two years. In fact, it was three years later that her health began to decline, only after she fell and hit her head. Shortly after that, Sharpe’s father appeared to suffer small strokes. “So now I have two parents in medical care,” Sharpe said.

Her parents were able to be at a rehabilitation facility together, but Sharpe said they were “losing the will to live,” so she brought them back home. Doctors recommended hospice, but her mother decided she wanted to undergo assisted suicide, which left her father distraught. Sharpe came up with an “interesting” solution.

“I had a very interesting, serious heart-to-heart conversation with him one evening after my mom had gone to bed,” she continued. “And he was just panicked like, ‘What happens to me if she goes first?’ That’s always been a concern of his. He couldn’t see a scenario where he would want to continue if mom was gone.”

She added, “He’s always been afraid of dying. But I think he was more afraid of being left alone. He was like, ‘Well, if she’s gonna go and I have the option to go at the same time, then I’m getting on that horse.’ So I was like, look, we’ll figure something out.”

At this point, her father was not dying, and if he suffered another stroke, doctors believed he could end up incapacitated, but not terminally ill. Yet Sharpe was able to get her father approved for assisted suicide, calling it “a race” to do so.

Sharpe spent what would be the last few weeks of her parents’ lives hosting family dinners, making them their favorite meals, and sharing memories as a way to “repay my parents for everything they’d done for me.” It sounds nice, but there’s no need for an adult child to wait until she knows her parents are dying to do such things for them.

When the drug powder arrived, Sharpe took a selfie with the delivery man and then stuck the drug on a shelf, where it feasibly could have been accessed by anyone. She then joked about choosing Friday the 13th to die, which is when her parents ultimately took the drugs – Friday, August 13, 2021.

“The counselors prepared the cocktail, we sat around and shared some private moments together. They got to sit in their own bed and hold hands with each other and talk before they were able to take the meds,” she said. “We put music on and they took the cocktail. Then we poured a glass of wine and we had a final toast. About 10 minutes after they drank it, they went to sleep.”

Zoom out

It has become increasingly common and romanticized for elderly couples to be euthanized together. This includes murder-suicides and those who opt to die together  simply because they are elderly.

But the reality of assisted suicide is that it may not be as peaceful and romantic as many have been led to believe.

As Dr. Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery at the Emory School of Medicine and an expert on “physician participation in lethal injection,” previously explained, assisted suicide can be excruciating, even if it doesn’t appear to be.

“[F]or both euthanasia and executions, paralytic drugs are used,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Spectator. “These drugs, given in high enough doses, mean that a patient cannot move a muscle, cannot express any outward or visible sign of pain. But that doesn’t mean that he or she is free from suffering.”

He added, “People who want to die deserve to know that they may end up drowning, not just falling asleep.”

Furthermore, a study in the medical journal Anaesthesia found that prolonged, painful deaths from assisted suicide and euthanasia were far from rare, with a considerable number of patients taking 30 hours to die, though some took seven days. Experiments with assisted suicide likewise have been painful, with one drug cocktail “burning patients’ mouths and throats, causing some to scream in pain.” The same drugs labeled as too inhumane to be used for lethal injection are used in assisted suicide.

The bottom line

Suicide is not dignified, peaceful, or romantic. Efforts are made to prevent suicide unless the person in question is elderly, ill, or disabled. And then, it’s made to appear noble and romantic to take your own life.

Reprinted with permission from Live Action.