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European watchdog threatens Hungary over 'possible rights abuses' following its anti-LGBT propaganda laws


My Northwest
Tue, 06 Jul 2021 07:00 UTC
parliament budapest hungary
© Xinhua/Attila Volgyi via Getty ImagesKossuth Square where the Parliament building stands in central Budapest, Hungary.
Recent laws introduced in Hungary regulating marriage and gender identity risk discriminating against LGBT people and should have been put to citizens for public consultation before they were passed, Europe's top rights watchdog said Tuesday.

Among other things, the changes to the Hungarian Constitution in December 2020 altered the definition of families to exclude transgender and other LGBT individuals, defining the basis of the family as "marriage and the parent-child relationship." It declared that "the mother is a woman and the father is a man."


Comment: It's a sign of how warped society in the West is that the above terms need to be defined; is it any wonder Hungary is on the defensive? Disgusting perverts or just misunderstood? Meet the zoophiles who have sex with animals and want to be embraced by Pride


The Venice Commission - an advisory group on constitutional matters to the 47-country Council of Europe human rights body - said the Hungarian "Omnibus Act" could limit adoptions to heterosexual parents.

Comment: The feigned concern over Hungary's emergency powers order is hypocritical in the extreme considering much of Europe locked up its citizens abusing similar powers.

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Bad Guys

Britain training Saudi troops & militia against Yemen, report reveals extent of UK involvement in war & humanitarian catastrophe


RT
Tue, 06 Jul 2021 13:55 UTC
soldier Saudi Arabia
© Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesAlong the Saudi -Yemeni border, near the town of Addayer, soldiers from the Saudi Arabia Border Guard patrol looking for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers.
A shadowy unit of British troops has reportedly been providing on-site training and support to Saudi forces in Yemen, bringing fresh scrutiny to the official UK stance of not being "party" to the ongoing conflict in the country.

For months, some 30 soldiers have been stationed at the coalition-occupied Al-Ghaydah airport in the restive eastern province of Mahra, according to news outlet Declassified UK. A number of human-rights groups have alleged torture of detainees at a prison located in the airport.

"The tasks assigned to them so far are military training and logistical support, either for Saudi forces or Saudi-backed militia that are elements from the Southern Transitional Council (a Yemeni secessionist group)," said Hameed Zaabnoot, a tribal leader who has organised ongoing mass sit-in protests against Saudi presence in Mahra.


Comment: Militia is often a euphemism for the Western-backed terrorist elements in the country: Leaked Docs Reveal US And Saudi Arabia Supplying Terrorists in Yemen - Serbia files (Part 3)


Comment: Not only is the country of strategic importance in the Middle East but, as noted in The simple truth about the Yemen catastrophe it may also prove to hold enviable oil reserves:
"Yemen boasts twelve sedimentary basins, but oil production has come from only two of these, both lying in the center of the country, indicating that there is promising potential for further exploration both on and offshore Yemen."

[...] these new reserves would be sweet oil and not the sludge Saudi Arabia is thinning with seawater to get it to pump.
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Dominoes

Sweden's PM avoids snap elections but could still be toppled by just one vote

Niclas Rolander
Bloomberg
Mon, 05 Jul 2021 16:37 UTC
Lofven
© John Thys/Pool via REUTERS/File PhotoSweden's Prime Minister Stefan Lofven speaks as he arrives to attend a face-to-face EU summit amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) lockdown in Brussels, Belgium December 10, 2020.
Sweden's caretaker prime minister, Stefan Lofven, said that he had secured enough support to form a new government and avoid snap elections, bringing some respite from the political turbulence that has rocked the Nordic region's largest economy in recent weeks.

Lofven, the leader of Sweden's Social Democrats, will seek to make his comeback in what is expected to be a knife-edge parliamentary vote on Wednesday.

"I was voted out a couple of weeks ago and the parties that were behind that have not been able to come up with a viable alternative," Lofven, 63, said at a press conference in Stockholm on Monday. "The country needs a government that has the ability to act."

Comment: It's rather telling that coalition governments and governments that generally lack any substantial support from Parliament and the general public seem to be the norm these days.

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Eye 1

PM to confirm end of lockdown despite fearmongering over 'rising infections', may introduce Covid IDs in winter

Aubrey Allegretti
The Guardian
Sun, 04 Jul 2021 22:30 UTC
boris
© ReutersBoris Johnson is to announce on Monday that the lifting of most remaining Covid-19 restrictions in England will go ahead on 19 July.
Boris Johnson is to announce that the lifting of most remaining Covid-19 restrictions in England will go ahead on 19 July amid a backlash from government scientific advisers who have warned that doing so would be like building new "variant factories".


Comment: Note the fearmongering rhetoric; did scientific advisers ever call flu sufferers 'variant factories'?


Despite cases having risen to their highest level since January 2021, the prime minister is set to press ahead with the final stage of unlocking in two weeks.

In a Downing Street press conference on Monday afternoon, he is expected to announce that, with 86% of adults in the UK having had at least a first jab, the government will move from relying on legal curbs to control people's behaviour to letting individuals make their own decisions.


Comment: They're normalizing draconian government interference in people's lives; in their newly formed apartheid society they will 'let' the vaccinated make their own decisions whilst those who refuse will suffer 'legal controls over their behaviour and decisions'.


Comment: See also: The Inanity of RNA Vaccines For COVID-19

And check out SOTT radio's: NewsReal: The Terrible Toll of Lockdowns



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Eye 1

Pro-Trump social media app briefly hacked hours after launch

Joseph Choi
The Hill
Mon, 05 Jul 2021 06:46 UTC
donald trump
© Brandon Bell/Pool via ReutersFormer president Donald Trump addresses a member of the news media after attending a border security briefing with Texas Governor Greg Abbott in Weslaco, Texas, June 30, 2021.
Gettr, a new social media site launched by allies of former President Trump, was briefly hacked on Sunday when it first went online.
"The problem was detected and sealed in a matter of minutes, and all the intruder was able to accomplish was to change a few user names," Jason Miller, the site's founder and Trump's former spokesperson, said in a statement to Reuters.
The usernames for accounts belonging to prominent figures like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Miller were changed to read, "JubaBaghdad was here, follow me in twitter :)," as seen in screenshots shared by Salon writer Zachary Petrizzo.

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Star of David

And there it is: Israel security institute says 'Israel needs to occupy Gaza to deter Hamas'


Middle East Monitor
Mon, 05 Jul 2021 20:04 UTC
israel tanks gasa border fence
© Faiz Abu Rmeleh/Anadolu AgencyIsraeli tanks and armoured vehicles are deployed to the Gaza Strip fence in Sderot on 29 March 2019
According to an Israeli security research institute, the repeated failure to deter Hamas makes it necessary for Israel to occupy the Gaza Strip and overthrow the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement.

According to Sama News Agency, in an article written by the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security's Israeli security expert Omer Dostri, Israel has a right: "To adopt a gradual approach in dealing with the various threats facing it."

In his paper, Dostri states that Israel: "Should deal with each threat separately, from the lightest to the heaviest, focusing as much as possible on the most serious threat it is facing, which is Iran's nuclear programme."

Comment: Israel may have overplayed its hand with Hamas, by attacking the Al Aqsa Mosque in May. Hamas issued warnings to back off, or it would begin firing rockets at Israeli cities. They weren't joking.

This time it's different
The current escalation is distinguished by the fact that the Palestinian people demanded a response to the practices of the Israeli occupation. Hamas, in responding, is being considered heroic. There is no public judgment or denunciation of Hamas' decision to act, even when citizens are paying the harshest price of Israeli aggression, losing their loved ones and their homes.

It is clear in Gaza that Palestinians remain firm in their belief in resistance as the pathway to liberation from occupation.

This round of fighting is also significant because it came as a response to continuous violations in Jerusalem. All previous rounds of Hamas escalation have been provoked by Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip. Thus, when Jerusalem called for Gaza's aid, and Gaza rose to defend Jerusalem, this amplified the burgeoning sense of Palestinian national unity and liberated the Palestinian resistance from its isolation in Gaza.

Whether in Gaza or anywhere else in Palestine, Palestinians struggle against the occupation, whose attacks and violations affect them everywhere.

This escalation has also been characterized by an increasingly defiant spirit within the resistance factions. The cancelation of the "Jerusalem Day" march was an early victory. The reality of suffering and tragedy is always present in Israeli aggressions on Gaza. Still, this time, the escalation feels meaningful, it feels heroic.

People across Palestine desperately needed someone to make them feel supported and defended. Palestinians need to feel they are not paying the price alone. It is therefore hugely significant that resistance has exploded across historic Palestine.

Israel has been committed to destroying the Palestinian identity, especially in deliberately economically deprived cities, towns and villages inside the 1948 boundaries - the areas where the state of Israel was declared that year, during the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Mass protests in those areas, the torching of police stations and the replacement of Israeli flags with Palestinian flags, all seem like a new revival of the Palestinian spirit.


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Stock Down

Crisis, Crash, Collapse

Charles Hugh Smith
Daily Reckoning
Sat, 26 Jun 2021 00:00 UTC
flag on rocks
© unknownOn the rocks
We have a fine-sounding word for running with the herd: momentum. When the herd is running, those who buy what the herd is buying and sell what the herd is selling are trading momentum, which sounds so much more professional and high-brow than the noisy, dusty image of large mammals (and their trading machines) mindlessly running with the herd.

We also have a fine-sounding phrase for anticipating where the herd is running: front-running. So when the herd is running into stocks, those who buy stocks just ahead of the herd are front-running the market.

When the Federal Reserve announces that it's going to make billionaires even wealthier with some new financial spew, those betting that stocks will never go down because the Fed has our back are front-running the Fed.

There are two remarkable assumptions at the heart of momentum and front-running: The momentum herd and those front-running the herd base their behavior on the assumption that there will always be other rich people who will sell all the shares they want to buy at today's prices before the run-up to new highs.

Comment: The Fed has structured the end game. Pattern recognition pays in the end - one way or another.

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Footprints

Over 1000 Afghan troops flee Taliban into Tajikistan


Yahoo News
Mon, 05 Jul 2021 06:20 UTC
Barred Bridge
© US Army via AFPShir Khan Bandar bridge at the Afghanistan-Tajikistan border
More than 1,000 Afghan troops fled into neighbouring Tajikistan on Monday following clashes with the Taliban, as the insurgents amassed momentum on the battlefield.

The exodus of troops followed another weekend of fighting across much of the northern countryside where the Taliban have overrun dozens of districts, spurring fears that Afghan forces are in crisis.

"They did not want to surrender. They had asked for reinforcements but their call was ignored," said Abdul Basir, a soldier based with a battalion in Badakhshan province that had members flee over the border.

Afghanistan map zones

Comment: It is now an exercise in 'filling the vacuum' left by the US withdrawal and 'marking territory'.

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Arrow Down

We should thank the unemployed for their service. They've been used to control inflation

Gareth Hutchins
abc.net.au
Sat, 03 Jul 2021 03:09 UTC
people lined up centrelink
© William West/AFP/Getty ImagesSince the 1980s, policymakers have asserted there is a "natural" level of unemployment for prevailing conditions.
I want to show you something. It has to do with our economy and it's probably been invisible to you. The majority of journalists have no idea about it and few politicians would, either. But it affects everyone and it shouldn't be something only economists know about.

Who controls the levers?

In this era of coronavirus lockdowns, we've learned a lot about our economic policy settings. For example, we've learned widespread poverty is a policy choice in Australia. Governments have the power to lift hundreds of thousands of households out of poverty if they want to.

The federal government did it last year, when it increased unemployment payments during the initial lockdowns. That situation lasted a few months. But then it let those families fall back into poverty by taking those special payments away again, as the graph below shows.

Comment: As soon as we try to control something, the potential undergoes limitation.

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Newspaper

Reporters Without Borders lists Viktor Orbán as 'press freedom predator' - only EU leader on the list

Merlin Sugue
Politico
Mon, 05 Jul 2021 19:30 UTC
orban
© Omar Marques/Getty Images
Reporters Without Borders has labeled Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán a "press freedom predator" for muzzling the country's media.

The NGO, known by its French acronym RSF, on Monday released a list of 37 heads of state and government who it says "embody in a particularly drastic way the ruthless suppression of press freedom." Orbán is the only EU leader on the list.

The Hungarian prime minister, RSF says, has together with his ruling Fidesz party "brought Hungary's media landscape under their control step by step" since coming to power in 2010, with government-friendly businessmen taking over outlets and targeting independent media.

Besides Orbán, RSF's "predator" list this year includes new additions such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam. Other figures remain on the list from the previous version in 2016, such as China's President Xi Jinping, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

"New names have been added in all regions of the world. Their methods of suppression are different, but serve the same purpose: to prevent critical reporting at all costs," RSF Director Christian Mihr said, adding that it is "frightening that those responsible often go unpunished despite committing brutal crimes."

Comment: Poland and Hungary - especially Orban - are at the top of the list of EU thought criminals. They're the only European countries who have made some show of resistance against takeover by the EU's special brand of woke totalitarianism. Any flaws or deviations from the program will be brought into focus, magnified, and made an example of - no matter how hypocritical.

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