Hungary's Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, has long been a stone in Brussels' shoe, but a dispute over funding for his Trump-style southern border wall could see him become even more problematic for Ursula von der Leyen and her Eurocrats.

As if the European Union did not have enough problems with its disputes over Brexit and arguments with Poland, now up pops Hungarian PM Viktor Orban like an inconvenient jack-in-the-box to throw yet more fuel on the roaring fire of discontent.

Orban's latest gripe with Brussels, and to be fair there are many, is that the bloc is refusing to reimburse Hungary for the construction of a wall on its southern border. The Hungarian government sanctioned the building of the wall back in 2015, as a response to the migrant crisis that was engulfing Europe. The initial intention was to prevent Hungary being used as a corridor for the deluge of migrants attempting to make their way west.

At the time, the Hungarian government made it clear to the migrants that those who did not intend on claiming asylum in Hungary could not use the country as a stepping stone to wealthier parts of Europe. Unsurprisingly, as a result, the number of migrants making their way into Hungary was drastically cut.

However, it has been an expensive project. The building and maintenance of the 523-kilometre wall, which stretches along the Serbian and Croatian border, has cost the Hungarian taxpayer around 600 billion forints (€1.67 billion). Nevertheless, it has been successful and this year alone 92,000 illegal border crossings have been prevented.

Biden's remarks came during a press conference as he answered a question from a reporter on criticism he has faced from Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.): "Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos."

"I don't intend to be anybody but Joe Biden, that's who I am," Biden said, in response. "What I'm trying to do is do the things I ran on to do, and look, people out there are ordinary, hard-working Americans [who have been] through the wringer the last couple of years."

"People are worried," Biden added, before suggesting that people do not understand why "the price of agricultural products" has increased.

"If we were all going out and having lunch together and I said let's ask whoever's in the next table, no matter what restaurant we're in, have them explain the supply chain to us. Do you think they'd understand what we're talking about?" Biden asked.

The Bank of England governor has said he is "very sorry" that UK inflation is rising amid forecasts the cost of living could reach as much as 5%.


Andrew Bailey told the BBC that households were already feeling the impact of rising prices.

"I'm very sorry that's happening," he said. "None of us want to see that happen."

On Thursday, the Bank surprised financial markets by voting to keep the interest rate unchanged.

President Biden flared in anger Saturday as he spoke in favor of his administration's plan to award $450,000 payments to migrants separated from their families after illegally crossing the US border — three days after he called a report on the payouts "garbage."

Blaming "the outrageous behavior of the last administration," Biden raised his voice and jabbed his finger at Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy, who asked about the administration's mixed messaging on the payout policy. Biden thundered:

"Whether [the border crossing] was legal or illegal, and you lost your child. You lost your child, it's gone — you deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what the circumstance. What that will be. I have no idea."

The Biden administration has been negotiating legal settlements with the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups that could shower up to $1 million per family on asylum seekers who were separated at the border under President Trump's "zero tolerance" illegal immigration policy.

"That's not gonna happen," Biden said flatly on Wednesday, when Doocy asked him about the initial report.

New Zealand won't be dragged into US hostilities with China, with which it has a 'mature' relationship that allows for disputes and differences to be resolved in a calm manner, PM Jacinda Ardern said.

Ardern was prompted several times to take a stance on the confrontation between the US and China during an interview with NBC's Chuck Todd. One question was whether New Zealanders see China as an "ally or adversary," to which the prime minister said her people will not "determine our relationship with any country in such stacked terms."

China is New Zealand's biggest trading partner, which, Ardern said, does not inhibit her country from criticizing Beijing when it sees fit.

In previous installments, I introduced the Great Reset idea1 and treated it in terms of its economic2 and ideological3 components. In this, the sixth installment, I will discuss what the Great Reset entails in terms of governance and the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4-IR), closing with remarks about the overall Great Reset project and its implications.

According to Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the 4-IR follows the first, second, and third Industrial Revolutions — the mechanical, electrical, and digital, respectively.4 The 4-IR builds on the digital revolution, but Schwab sees the 4-IR as an exponential takeoff and convergence of existing and emerging fields, including Big Data; artificial intelligence; machine learning; quantum computing; and genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. The consequence is the merging of the physical, digital, and biological worlds. The blurring of these categories ultimately challenges the very ontologies by which we understand ourselves and the world, including "what it means to be human."5

The specific applications that make up the 4-R are too numerous and sundry to treat in full, but they include a ubiquitous internet, the internet of things, the internet of bodies, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and more.

Charles Dolan's involvement in the dossier saga flips Democrats' allegations of Russian collusion on their head

The Clinton operative who provided information for the infamous Steele dossier worked for years for the Russian government and its state-owned gas giant Gazprom, though his activities are not disclosed in foreign agent filings with the Department of Justice.

Charles Dolan, a longtime Democratic operative and public-relations maven, worked as a senior consultant for the Russian government from 2006 to 2014 and in 2016 had extensive contacts with high-level Russian officials, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday by Special Counsel John Durham. Dolan in 2016 also fed information to Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst who served as the primary source for Christopher Steele, a former British spy who investigated Donald Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. During the years he worked for Russia, Dolan was not registered with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, according to a review of government records.

Changes definition of COVID death from 'with COVID' to 'by COVID'.

The Italian Higher Institute of Health has drastically reduced the country's official COVID death toll number by over 97 per cent after changing the definition of a fatality to someone who died from COVID rather than with COVID.

Italian newspaper Il Tempo reports that the Institute has revised downward the number of people who have died from COVID rather than with COVID from 130,000 to under 4,000.

"Yes, you read that right. Turns out 97.1% of deaths hitherto attributed to Covid were not due directly to Covid," writes Toby Young.

Of the of the 130,468 deaths registered as official COVID deaths since the start of the pandemic, only 3,783 are directly attributable to the virus alone.

Austria will soon bar the unvaccinated from entering a long list of public places, among them bars, cafes and hotels, the country's chancellor said, pointing to an unexpectedly rapid surge in Covid-19 cases.

The entry ban will come into effect next week and will apply to cafes, bars, restaurants, theaters, ski lodges, hotels, hairdressers and any event involving more than 25 people, Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg told reporters on Friday. The move could affect a large swath of Austria's population, with some 36% of its residents still not fully immunized against the virus.

"The evolution is exceptional and the occupancies of intensive-care beds are increasing significantly faster than we had expected," Schallenberg said in announcing the new restrictions, as cited by Reuters.

After a fascinating week in America, some important trends are clear - with the most obvious being that voters expect much more from Joe Biden, increasing the need for the Democrats to get their agenda through Congress.

Headlines across America are proclaiming the Tuesday elections as a major setback for President Joe Biden. Even Gayle King of left-leaning CBS called election night "a major victory for Republicans," and CNN's Democratic political commentator, Van Jones, declared it a "five-alarm fire" for Democrats. While the election results have focused the attention of the left-leaning media on Democratic weaknesses, the voters were clearly paying attention to issues, too, because even in an "off, off year," the election had a record turnout.

Left-leaning Virginia casts its vote against the Democrats

Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic governor of Virginia whose last term ended in January 2018, lost to Republican Glenn Youngkin in a state claimed handily by Biden a year ago. With 99% of the vote in, Youngkin won by a 2% margin.

From July 2016 to July 2017, the popular McAuliffe had served as chair of the National Governors Association, and from 2001-2005 he was chair of the Democratic National Committee. The race is being seen as a significant upset because such strong gubernatorial credentials and campaign experience made him the natural go-to guy to be the next governor of a left-leaning state, running against a tycoon-turned-politician like Youngkin.

McAuliffe's strategy of turning Youngkin's Donald-Trump-style credentials against him failed in a mostly blue state, and Trump seized that failure to claim, "The MAGA movement is bigger and stronger than ever before." Youngkin made the cultural issues that energize MAGA voters the core of his campaign and turned the election map of Virginia into a blood-bath of red as a swath of counties voted Republican, except a handful in the most urban areas of the east coast and a single island of blue in the heart of the state, Albemarle County.

One particularly hot-button issue, which Youngkin repeatedly raised, was giving parents much more say in what is taught in the state's public schools. Youngkin had often quoted and criticized McAuliffe for proclaiming,

"I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."

In a CNN exit poll, more than half of voters said parents should have more say in what is taught in schools, indicating that core issue for Youngkin drove the voter turnout. Democrats also appear to have lost their majority in the Virginia House of Delegates with four races not yet officially called.