who care more for profit then humans." That same year, she also commented on the conspiracy theory linking 5G to COVID-19, tweeting "Prevention is always better then cure. Can you love vax and 5G at the same time?" and expressing the belief that 5G is able to "confuse or slow the body down in healing process as body is learning to cope with new singles wavelength s frequency etc @ same time as Cov." In October 2022, after American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered to pay almost $1 billion to the parents of children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, M.I.A. tweeted: "If Alex Jones pays for lying, shouldn't every celebrity pushing vaccines pay too?" Politics M.I.A. endorsed candidate Jan Jananayagam at the 2009 European Parliament election, a last-minute candidate standing on a platform of anti-genocide, civil liberties, financial transparency, the environment and women's rights, who became one of the most successful independent election candidates ever despite her loss in the general election. In October 2009, she stated that the President of the United States Barack Obama should give back his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize "like John Lennon sent back his MBE." She said in one interview, playing on the famous Lennon phrase "Give Peace a Chance": "I'm a bit beyond being an artist who says, 'Give peace a chance.' Part of me is like, 'Give war a chance,' just to stir it up, you know what I mean?" In 2010, she condemned the Chinese Government's role in supporting and supplying arms to the Sri Lankan government during the conflict in an interview with music magazine Mondomix, stating that China's influence within the UN was preventing prosecutions of war crimes committed during the conflict. Following the 2011 United Kingdom anti-austerity protests and the 2011 London riots, during which her cousin's jewellery shop in Croydon was attacked and looted, M.I.A. criticised the UK Government's response to the rioters as failing to address the root causes. She recalled the importance of a council funded youth worker she had in her school years and the use of tax money to incentivise a new business job creation program amongst the working class. She stated that the top forty companies in Britain who banked offshore should be made to pay taxes in the UK and "cut the poor people some slack." M.I.A. has been a supporter of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.