Chinese technology company Huawei reportedly tapped Democratic mega-lobbyist Tony Podesta to help them appeal to the Biden administration.

Podesta — the founder of Podesta Group and the brother of Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta — faced investigation for violating foreign lobbying laws while working with a Ukrainian organization linked to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, although his firm was never charged.

A report from Politico explains:

Huawei is hiring Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta as a consultant, according to two people familiar with the matter. Podesta will aim to help the controversial Chinese telecom giant warm relations with the Biden administration.

Huawei is not Podesta's first major China client. Disclosure forms show that his former company also represented the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), which funds a host of activities in the U.S. The University of Texas at Austin in 2018 rejected a funding offer from the foundation because of concerns about its links to the Chinese Communist Party.

Indeed, Huawei has embarked upon a massive effort to enlist lobbyists from both sides of the aisle:

Thousands of protesters across France have rebelled against plans for COVID-19 passes to enter restaurants and mandatory vaccinations for health workers. However, three-quarters of the population support the idea.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday called for "unity" in the country against a fresh COVID surge by asking citizens to get vaccinated after mass protests against his measures a day earlier.

About 160,000 people rallied in Paris and around the country to demonstrate against a bill that would require citizens who work in healthcare to get vaccinated, while introducing COVID passes for entry to restaurants and cultural venues. Similar protests last weekend attracted more than 100,000 people.

Have you heard of "The Disinformation Dozen" yet? They're the twelve people that, according to The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), "are responsible for almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media platforms."

You see, you might think that it is well-documented research about the known short-term effects and unknown long-term effects of the unapproved gene therapy injections that are making people hesitant about sticking the COVID "vaccines" in their arms. But you'd be wrong.

According to the CCDH's super serious and rigorously researched report on the subject, it is in fact this small group of dedicated disinformationists who have single-handedly warped the minds of millions of poor, innocent social media users. These loathsome liars and avid anti-science activists are, the CCDH informs us, the true source of the public's misgivings about the jab.

Don't trust your lying eyes! Believe our good old friends at the mysterious CCDH (who studiously avoid the question of where they get their own fund in the "About" section of their website) when they tell you that it's this handful of cranks and charlatans who are creating hordes of tinfoil anti-vaxxers with their cunningly crafted tweets and their perfectly persuasive Instagram posts.

So, who are these online gurus, exactly? Who are the social media Svengalis leading the online hordes off of the digital cliffs? Who should we as a society be living in mortal fear of? Why, THESE people, of course!

Sajid Javid has apologised for saying it was time to stop "cowering" from Covid, after an outcry from families bereaved by the virus.

On Saturday, the health secretary said on Twitter that he had recovered from coronavirus - which he contracted despite having had two doses of the vaccine. "Please - if you haven't yet - get your jab, as we learn to live with, rather than cower from, this virus," he said.

His use of the word "cower" led some to accuse him of failing to understand the concerns of those whose underlying conditions make them particularly vulnerable to the virus - or who have lost loved ones.

Following the French government's announcement July 12th that all healthcare workers must accept an American-made mRNA jab by end September - and that everyone else would be financially and socially pressured into accepting one too - governments around the world have followed suit, in 'lockstep', it seems, with orders coming from God-knows-where.

In reaction to this draconian move, mass protests have erupted everywhere, with the media either not reporting on them or misreporting their scale.

This week on NewsReal, Joe and Niall take stock of the global upheaval caused by this desperate effort to 'jab everyone now!'

Join them LIVE from 4pm CET / 10am US Eastern / 2pm UTC


Running Time: 01:30:30

Download: MP3 — 65.4 MB

Cash in people's pockets would be superseded by a new 'Britcoin' digital currency in a plan being pushed by Chancellor Rishi Sunak.

In what Treasury insiders say would be the biggest upheaval in the monetary system for centuries, the Bank of England would establish a direct digital equivalent to physical money and take control of it in the same way as sterling.

Its supporters in the Treasury say that it would allow the Bank to give the economy a boost in times of financial crisis by paying the 'Britcoins' directly into people's bank accounts.

After the Biden administration's Department of Education was forced to walk back guidance on schools reopening that included counsel from critical race theory purveyors Abolitionist Teaching Network, the White House disavowed the group in a press briefing on Thursday.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki took a question on the retraction from the Department of Education from Fox News' correspondent Peter Doocy.

"Now that the education department admits that they made a mistake in their guidance for reopening — "

After extraordinary revelations that the Israeli company NSO Group's mercenary cyber-surveillance tool, Pegasus, was allegedly used to target political dissidents, human rights activists, journalists and politicians around the world, Israel should be asking itself a few questions. Does its groundbreaking hi-tech industry have a dark side? Do the actors involved in exporting lucrative surveillance products - including the defence ministry, which must approve such sales, or perhaps the top levels of the previous government - bear responsibility?

While top Israeli officials are taking the revelations seriously, Israelis appear neither shamed nor shaken. The day after the NSO story broke, there was an announcement from another company that would eclipse talk of the rogue use of surveillance spyware. Ben & Jerry's announced that it would cease the sale of its products in the "occupied Palestinian territories". By midweek one had to squint to find NSO in the Israeli media, as the ice cream incident was dominating headlines. Persecution of human rights defenders, sabotaging freedom of the press, surveillance of political opposition and possible links to grisly murder all took second place, while a non-violent political protest by a single private company, set to begin a year and a half from now (when Ben and Jerry's licensing deal runs out), overshadowed everything.

The ensuing ice cream fever offers a penetrating view into Israel's public priorities. Orna Barbivai, Israel's minister of economy, made a video of her dumping Ben & Jerry's containers in the bin, while former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote a cheeky tweet supporting a counter-boycott. Foreign minister and alternate prime minster Yair Lapid called Ben and Jerry's move a "shameful surrender to antisemitism". Channel 13's US-based correspondent raced to the company's home state of Vermont to cover breaking developments, and Israel's president called it "a new kind of terrorism".

Representatives from Russia and the US have already held four rounds of discussions over cybersecurity, it was revealed on Thursday. The topic was a focus of the meeting between the countries' presidents when they met last month.

On the topic of Russian-American dialogue on urgent nuclear issues, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov explained that Moscow has spoken to the new US administration four times about the subject, but he did not reveal any results.

The revelation came after Ryabkov was asked a question regarding a recent announcement that the two countries had made contact about the issue. However, according to the senior diplomat, Washington is only interested in discussing attacks on American infrastructure, and won't engage Moscow in discussions about other aspects.

Russia and China are betting that autocracy will beat democracy. That's according to US President Joe Biden. But apart from generating headlines, his explosive claim seems to have little to do with the reality in either country.

Not only is lumping the two states together a mistake, so too is the act of contrasting the two ideologies. The language of political philosophy is, sadly, unsuited to the task of describing political realities. We bandy about words such as "liberalism," "socialism," and "fascism," as if we know what they mean. In fact, they are horribly loose categories that even the brightest political philosopher struggles to define, and confuse more often than they help.

Biden fits neatly within an American tradition that regards the United States as the natural leader of the "free" world, splitting countries neatly into two - democracies on the one hand, and everybody else on the other.

Regardless of the huge variety of differences between the nations in the "other" category, they tend to be lumped in together under a single heading: autocracy. There is no room for shades of gray. Thus, in the president's rhetoric, the world consists of two parts: democracies and autocracies.