The European Union's chief executive vowed Wednesday to take any action necessary to thwart a new law in Hungary that would ban content portraying or promoting homosexuality or sex reassignment to children.

The Hungarian parliament passed the bill last week, but it must be endorsed by the president to take effect. It prohibits sharing content on homosexuality or sex reassignment to people under 18 in school sex education programs, films or advertisements. The government says it's meant to protect children but critics of the law say it links homosexuality with pedophilia.

"This Hungarian bill is a shame," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said. "This bill clearly discriminates against people based on their sexual orientation. It goes against the fundamental values of the European Union: human dignity, equality and respect for human rights."

The US and some other Western nations held up as "models of liberal democracy" are rapidly turning into totalitarian regimes reminiscent of the Soviet Union, the head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service has claimed.

Speaking on Thursday at the Moscow Conference on International Security, Sergey Naryshkin claimed that there are "almost all signs of a totalitarian dictatorship" in some Western countries, including a "monopoly on the media," the "police nature of the state," and the "irremovability of oligarchic elites."

On Tuesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson discussed a new report that Google funded Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance and also censored searches for information about the possibility the coronavirus was released from a lab in China.

The National Pulse revealed that "Google funded research conducted by Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance — a controversial group which has openly collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on 'killer' bat coronavirus research — for over a decade."

"A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal had a really interesting event," Tucker said. "It was called the Tech Health Conference."

"During that event, one reporter had a question for the head of Google's health division, a man called David Feinberg. Why, that reporter asked, was Google censoring searches for information about the possibility that COVID had, in fact, escaped from a laboratory in China? Feinberg began by admitting the premise of the question," Tucker explained.

"Yes. Google was in fact hiding information from its users, he effectively conceded. But it was for their own good."

Twenty-one Republicans, led by Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., on Wednesday introduced a resolution to censure President Biden for what the lawmakers described as a "failure" to faithfully execute U.S. border and immigration laws - as Republicans continue to hit the administration for its handling of the crisis at the southern border.

"My censure resolution holds President Biden accountable for his actions - or lack thereof - at the border," Boebert said in a statement. "Biden has refused to enforce the laws securing our border, he has refused to visit our border, his border czar Kamala has refused to visit the border, and his Secretary of Homeland Security is lying to the American people by saying that our border is closed."

The resolution expresses "disapproval of the failure to uphold the constitutional duty to 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed' and the usurpation of the legislative authority of Congress by the President of the United States."

Like an abusive partner, the Central Intelligence Agency is now so confident it is immune from criticism and consequences that it feels completely free to do the things it used to do in the shadows in plain sight.

In the later years of an abusive relationship I was in, my abuser had become so confident in how mentally caged he had me that he'd start overtly telling me what he is and what he was doing. He flat-out told me he was a sociopath and a manipulator, trusting that I was so submitted to his will by that point that I'd gaslight myself into reframing those statements in a sympathetic light. Toward the end one time he told me "I am going to rape you," and then he did, and then he talked about it to some friends trusting that I'd run perception management on it for him.

The better he got at psychologically twisting me up in knots and the more submitted I became, the more open he'd be about it. He seemed to enjoy doing this, taking a kind of exhibitionistic delight in showing off his accomplishments at crushing me as a person, both to others and to me. Like it was his art, and he wanted it to have an audience to appreciate it.

I was reminded of this while watching a recent Fox News appearance by Glenn Greenwald where he made an observation we've discussed here previously about the way the CIA used to have to infiltrate the media, but now just openly has US intelligence veterans in mainstream media punditry positions managing public perception.

The United States' "seizure" of domains belonging to some Iranian websites, including Press TV, is because Washington does not want Iran to challenge the US' "hostile propaganda," a political analyst says.

"By shutting down Press TV[.com domain], the US is attempting to deprive Iran of its capacity to challenge hostile propaganda, and put forth its own counter-narrative of controversial events, and more generally of peace, justice, and democratic governance,"

American scholar Richard Falk told the Press TV's website in an interview on Wednesday.

"In effect, being able to exercise monopoly control of media platforms is a crucial representation of power."

Syria is back in the news again. This time, it's not about hospitals allegedly being bombed, but a drought devastating Syria's wheat harvest. But there's a lot more to the story than a simple 'Act of God'.

A recent article on Reuters would have readers believe the current Syrian wheat shortage is mainly due to drought. The article makes a passing reference to the crippling Western sanctions choking Syrians, but doesn't emphasize how those sanctions contribute to the wheat shortage, as well as the fuel shortage, massive hyperinflation, and an all-round worsening of Syrian lives.

On June 16, Prensa Latina reported on wheat theft by US occupation forces noting, "a convoy of 32 trucks and containers loaded with looted wheat left for Iraq... The column was guarded by vehicles of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (FDS)."

The prosecution of major Parisian company heads for collaborating with 'enemy' governments has captured the media's attention. But the fact this is standard practice for France stubbornly remains the elephant in the room.

On June 22, it was announced that four executives at French companies had been charged with "complicity in acts of torture" over allegations they'd helped North African authorities spy on opposition figures who were subsequently detained and tortured.

Philippe Vannier, former chief of defence firm Amesys, and Olivier Bohbot, current head of homeland security specialist Nexa Technologies, were among those indicted. The former is accused of providing "deep packet inspection"solutions to the government of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, which allowed authorities to secretly intercept private internet communications. The latter purportedly sold Cerebro software, capable of real-time message and call tracing, to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Chinese scientists have deleted crucial data from the earliest confirmed Covid patients, it emerged today amid intense scrutiny about the true origins of the disease.


Dozens of test samples from patients in epicentre Wuhan were found to have been wiped from an international database used to track the virus' evolution.

The files could have provided vital clues about how the virus originated and how long it had been spreading before the seafood market outbreak in December 2019.

The American professor who spotted their deletion and managed to recover some of the data said they suggested Covid was circulating long before China's official timeline.

Far from being a war against "white supremacy," the Biden administration's new "domestic terror" strategy clearly targets primarily those who oppose US government overreach and those who oppose capitalism and/or globalization.

In the latest sign that the US government's War on Domestic Terror is growing in scope and scale, the White House on Tuesday revealed the nation's first ever government-wide strategy for confronting domestic terrorism. While cloaked in language about stemming racially motivated violence, the strategy places those deemed "anti-government" or "anti-authority" on a par with racist extremists and charts out policies that could easily be abused to silence or even criminalize online criticism of the government.

Even more disturbing is the call to essentially fuse intelligence agencies, law enforcement, Silicon Valley, and "community" and "faith-based" organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, as well as unspecified foreign governments, as partners in this "war," which the strategy makes clear will rely heavily on a pre-crime orientation focused largely on what is said on social media and encrypted platforms. Though the strategy claims that the government will "shield free speech and civil liberties" in implementing this policy, its contents reveal that it is poised to gut both.

Indeed, while framed publicly as chiefly targeting "right-wing white supremacists," the strategy itself makes it clear that the government does not plan to focus on the Right but instead will pursue "domestic terrorists" in "an ideologically neutral, threat-driven manner," as the law "makes no distinction based on political view — left, right or center." It also states that a key goal of this strategic framework is to ensure "that there is simply no governmental tolerance . . . of violence as an acceptable mode of seeking political or social change," regardless of a perpetrator's political affiliation.