Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has promised to defund “woke” university degrees in Britain, arguing they have provided “little value” to the taxpaying public.
Shadow Education Secretary Suella Braverman said this week that a Reform government would cut student loans for degrees in gender studies, social justice, critical race theory, queer studies, and other “woke” subjects at British universities.
“Young people have been conned into tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt for degrees that too often leave them with poor job prospects while taxpayers are left footing the bill,” Braverman toldThe Telegraph. “Meanwhile, our economy is crying out for home-grown engineers, scientists, technicians, builders and skilled tradespeople.”
The Reform education spokeswoman said that if students wanted to attend such programmes, they would have to pay for them themselves rather than receive taxpayer support.
Meanwhile, to incentivise universities to perform, Braverman also said that “persistently failing universities offering poor-quality provision” would be stripped of their publicly-funded student finance subsidies.
In contrast to the left-wing ethos which has dominated British education in recent years, the Nigel Farage-led party has also vowed to “ensure British children are not indoctrinated in schools, that they learn of Britain’s great and proud history.”
Reform has also committed to “defend free speech, uphold British traditions, ban DEI quotas, and reject the politics of guilt.”
According to The Telegraph, so-called gender studies programmes are typically featured as postgraduate degrees in the United Kingdom. The broadsheet said it had identified over 35 such programmes offered as Master’s or PhD degrees at universities across Britain.
The paper noted that students seeking a Master’s degree are eligible for government loans of over £13,000 per year, while PhD students can receive loans of up to £30,000.
British universities have been at the forefront of advancing far-left academic ideologies, particularly in the “decolonise the curriculum” movement. This has seen British universities become leading attack dogs in the attempt to tear down British culture, heritage, and history in favour of modernist multiculturalism.
For example, in 2024, the University of Nottingham removed the term “Anlgo-Saxon” from British literature and history courses in a bid to reduce “nationalist narratives” surrounding the topic.
That same year, academics at the University of Sheffield were granted nearly £1.5 million in taxpayer funds to conduct a study on the “white-centricity” of folk music in England and how to “decolonise” the songs.
Great works of British literature have also frequently come under fire from modern academics, with classics such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales being slapped with “trigger warnings” for having “expressions of Christian faith”.
Amsterdam has expanded restrictions on public barbecuing as part of a broader campaign to reduce wood smoke, improve air quality and limit nuisance in city parks.
The measures form part of the Beleidskader Houtstook Amsterdam, the city’s wood-burning policy framework, which the city council adopted on September 17, 2025 after a public consultation.
As part of that framework, the municipality is examining the installation of electricity points in parks and green spaces so that people can cook outdoors without charcoal. The study, which runs through 2026, covers parks, public gardens and woodland.
Officials are also in talks with operators of children’s recreation sites that still use open fires, seeking cleaner substitutes. The framework names nature playgrounds among the sites concerned and sets 2026 as the start date for those discussions.
According to the municipality, smoke from charcoal and fire pits causes health problems and a nuisance. Some 42 per cent of Amsterdam residents report being bothered by wood smoke, according to figures in the framework.
The city sent out a leaflet filled with guidance on barbecuing.
It warned that particulate matter from barbecue and wood smoke can penetrate deep into the lungs and may even end up in food.
The city identifies charcoal barbecues and open outdoor fires as among the most polluting forms of wood burning, citing fine particulate emissions.
The framework cites the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), which has described tackling domestic wood burning as the most cost-effective way to improve air quality. After industry, it is the largest single contributor to fine particulate concentrations in the Dutch capital.
A municipal website claims that an evening of burning wood in a stove emits as much fine particulate matter as a car journey of 1,000 to 3,000 kilometres.
In still or foggy conditions, residents are asked not to light fires at all. The city directs them to the Stookwijzer, a national online tool that issues colour codes and advises against burning at code orange or red.
The council also urges residents to check with their neighbours beforehand to see if they expect to be bothered by the smoke.
The leaflet even refers to a website offering tips on how to have such conversations.
Under current municipal rules, charcoal barbecues are already banned or heavily restricted across large parts of the city.
An official interactive map divides parks into free zones, designated barbecue spots and no-go areas.
Disposable barbecues are prohibited. Reusable grills must stand at least 10cm above the grass and at least two metres from trees or bushes, and users are required to keep a means of extinguishing fire within reach.
Fines for breaches stand at €95. In Amsterdam-Zuid, the southern borough that includes the Vondelpark, barbecuing is already forbidden in every park, a restriction first imposed in 2011.
The framework did not pass unopposed. The VVD and JA21 argued it went too far, with VVD councillor Laurent Staartjes warning it could prove a first step towards a total ban that would eventually reach private gardens.
Amsterdam has become the world’s first capital city to prohibit public advertisements for meat products, alongside fossil fuels,. https://t.co/sylWV79SpF
The parents of a 22-year-old student murdered in Trier have called for Germany’s political “firewall” against the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to be dismantled, arguing that politicians must be prepared to work with the party to secure majorities for tougher immigration policies.
Marius Dick was stabbed to death at around 10 a.m. on July 15 while returning from shopping on Robert-Schumann-Allee. According to the reported account, Afghan asylum seeker Sajad M., also 22, emerged from behind a hedge and stabbed him in the chest with a kitchen knife, piercing his heart.
The two men did not know each other. The suspect had reportedly been declared mentally ill by a public health officer, despite previously being regarded as well-integrated and described as a pleasant neighbor and colleague.
Three weeks after their son’s death, Thomas and Elke Dick told Welt that Germany’s established parties must abandon their refusal to cooperate with the AfD.
“You have to seek majorities to find majorities. That also means sitting down with the AfD and talking about common ground,” they said.
The couple warned that dangerous migrants and refugees were moving around Germany without authorities knowing where they were and demanded that politicians “finally” act to stop the continuing series of violent attacks.
They said the violence had continued even after Marius’s killing, pointing to the subsequent attack on Christopher Street Day in Berlin.
The intervention is particularly significant because both parents are CDU members. The party leadership continues to reject parliamentary cooperation with the AfD under the longstanding political firewall. After the last federal election, the AfD became the second-largest party in the Bundestag, but because of the firewall, was unable to agree a coalition government with the center-right CDU, paving the way for yet another Grand Coalition between the CDU and the Social Democrats (SPD).
The Dicks said they had lost confidence in the governing parties’ willingness and ability to halt illegal immigration and migrant violence. They also questioned whether their own party genuinely intended to act, saying cooperation with the AfD was now necessary rather than a matter of political sympathy.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz contacted the family five days after the murder, but the parents said no meaningful political consequences followed.
Their appeal comes as establishment pressure for proceedings against the AfD continues to grow. Earlier this week, the Republican Lawyers’ Association said 1,051 lawyers, judges, and prosecutors had signed a petition urging Germany’s federal institutions to seek a constitutional ban on the party, up from about 500 signatories in mid-July.
Meanwhile, the AfD has continued to gain support, becoming the most popular party in Berlin in an Insa poll published last month. It received 19 percent, ahead of the CDU and Left party on 18 percent each. The Greens recorded 16 percent and the Social Democrats 13 percent.
AfD co-leader Alice Weidel has continuously demanded stricter naturalization rules, faster deportations, and tougher asylum laws, in line with what she says law enforcement agencies have been crying out for.
“Restrictive naturalization laws, stricter deportation rules, tightening of asylum law: What the German Police Union vainly demands from Merz has long been policy in the AfD,” she wrote on X. “With an AfD government, the migration turnaround is coming!”
Irish health chiefs have declared that “pregnant men” are entitled to maternity leave—despite pregnancy and childbirth being exclusively female.
Gript reports that new guidance from the state-run Health Service Executive (HSE) says transgender employees who are legally recognised as male can claim 26 weeks of paid maternity leave if they become pregnant or give birth.
“Since 2023, transgender men who are pregnant or have given birth can access maternity leave,” the advice states.
To qualify, employees must hold a gender recognition certificate under Ireland’s Gender Recognition Act 2015, which allows a woman to change her legal sex to male.
They can also claim a further 16 weeks of unpaid maternity leave immediately after the paid period ends.
The policy lays bare a striking contradiction in Ireland’s gender laws. The state officially records the employee as a man while granting maternity rights based on the uniquely female realities of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding.
Separate HSE employment guidelines published in June confirm that “transgender men who have given birth can access statutory maternity leave”.
Yet the same document says maternity laws protect pregnant employees, those who have recently given birth and those who are breastfeeding—without acknowledging that all three groups are necessarily female.
The rules follow changes introduced under the Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2023.
An analysis by Irish law firm Byrne Wallace Shields said the legislation was amended to bring transgender men who had obtained gender recognition certificates and subsequently given birth within the scope of existing maternity protections.
HSE employees who qualify receive their basic salary and normal fixed allowances during the 26-week period, minus any maternity benefit paid by the Department of Social Protection.
They also continue to build up pension, annual-leave and seniority rights and may take breastfeeding breaks after returning to work.
But the guidance falls back on ordinary sex-based language when confronting the realities of parenthood. It says maternity leave can transfer to “the father” if “the mother” dies during childbirth and confirms that fathers can attend the final two antenatal classes.
The result is an extraordinary official position: Ireland can legally declare someone to be a man while recognising that the same person can conceive, give birth and breastfeed.
At the end of his long and magnificent life, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote:
“I began to reflect at a time when our culture was aggressing other cultures, and in that period I set myself up as their defender and witness. Today I have the impression that the movement has been reversed and that our culture has ended up on the defensive in the face of external threats, among which figures the Islamic explosion. And suddenly I found myself being an ethnological defender, and firmly resolved, of my own culture.”
Pippa Bacca, a Milanese artist, pseudonym of Giuseppina Pasqualino Di Marineo, niece of Piero Manzoni, began her itinerant tour “Brides on tour” in a white wedding dress.
To teach Israel “how to make peace,” the Italian leftist decided to hitchhike from Italy to Israel. She had even learned Arabic, to demonstrate that “Islam is not violent.”
A hitchhiking journey, unconditional trust in others and in the brotherhood among peoples. What could possibly go wrong?
“The only thing that scares me is the cold,” Pippa had said before setting off through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Bulgaria.
But in Turkey, Pippa met Murat Karatash and her life ended in horror and brutality. Raped and murdered.
Thus concluded Pippa’s parabola, within her own creative work.
Meanwhile another Italian activist, Vittorio Arrigoni, a homosexual, had arrived in Gaza on a boat against the Israeli “blockade” (of weapons) to help “the Palestinian Arab people.” He had tattooed on his arm the Arabic word for “resistance” (مقاومة, muqāwama).
The jihadists of Gaza kidnapped and killed him.
For twenty years it is as if we had put Pippa Bacca in charge of Europe.
The attack at Berlin’s Pride once again demonstrates that out there roam wolves who in the name of Islam want to tear us bodily apart. Faced with this very serious danger, a country can react in two ways. Either the rule of law passes from prey to hunter, even if unpleasant images will arise, for example during raids.
Or a country reacts by continuing to put on the waiting list phrases like the one about the “way of life” and the other about “our thoughts are with the victims.” And that is what we in the Westhave chosen to do.
“And what shocked me was that the first thing I thought was: I hope it’s not an immigrant, I hope it’s a white Christian person, but it wasn’t like that,” says a likable LGBT activist after the Berlin attack.
We also know that the attacker was attending a “de-radicalization course,” which is a kind of voodoo rite invented by idiots.
It is called masochism and it is the principal disease of Western civilization. A Lévi-Strauss would be needed to decipher it, but we do not have one.
The West has turned its values – sexual freedom, gender equality, protection of minorities – into weapons against itself.
Pippa Bacca feared the cold, not the man. Arrigoni feared Israel, not the Salafists. The organizers of Berlin Pride fear “instrumentalization,” not those who kill them.
Perhaps the end of Western civilization will not arrive with barbarian invasions, but in a wedding dress, a resistance tattoo and prayers that the murderer be white and Christian.
Rukhsar Ahmed did not attend his bail hearing as he was ‘too unwell to fly’ despite social media images showing him campigning in Pakistan at the time of his hearing. FACEBOOK/RUKHSAR AHMED
A former Pakistani state minister has been arrested on suspicion of raping vulnerable girls in Manchester in the 1990s.
Rukhsar Ahmed was re-elected as an MP in Pakistan after more than five years out of office last week.
He has been on bail in the UK since his arrest in July 2024 on suspicion of rape and trafficking children in care as part of a grooming gang.
Ahmed, 62, was expected to answer bail at a police station in Manchester last month, but he failed to appear because he was “too unwell to fly”.
At the same time, he was pictured on social media campaigning throughout northern Pakistan.
He was elected last week as the MP for Azad Jammu for the party of Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif.
He represents the centre-right Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, and was a minister in various state governments from 2006 until 2021, when he lost his seat.
It is understood that Greater Manchester Police attempted to restrict Ahmed’s ability to travel abroad as part of his bail conditions, but a judge rejected those conditions in July 2024.
He was arrested at Manchester Airport on July 18, 2024, in relation to past sexual abuse allegations linked to the Rusholme area of Manchester, where he resided for many years.
The politician has more than 17,000 followers on social media and was pictured in Rusholme as recently as May this year.
He is the former owner of a restaurant, the Gujjar Palace, near Manchester’s curry mile.
A friend said people would travel hundreds of miles to see Ahmed, given his role in Pakistani politics.
A senior leader of PML-N in Pakistan-administered Kashmir said he had known Ahmed for at least two decades; however, he did not know about the rape allegations against him.
He said: “We just heard that he was part of some groups in Manchester in 1990s. But I personally didn’t know about such severe allegations existed against Ahmed.”
It is understood that GMP detectives learnt about his involvement in politics whilst he was detained and questioned.
The investigation is linked with allegations from multiple women about sexual abuse of children in a care home in the early 1990’s when Ahmed was in his late 20s.
Friends of Ahmed told The Guardian that he was “incredibly influential” in Manchester’s Pakistani community due to his political links.
An associate said he was a “man of the people,” and “one of the least corrupt people.”
Another man described him as “a man of conviction who helps people who need it”.
The Gujar Palace now appears boarded up and not in use.
A local said it has not been operational since at least 2009.
Father Javier Aizpún, a priest in the Archdiocese of Pamplona and Tudela, went viral in recent days after he called for a “Reconquista” of Morocco to Catholicism in response to tens of thousands of migrants swarming into Spain last week.
Per various Spanish media outlets, Aizpún, the canon of the Pamplona Cathedral, in a series of since deleted social media posts in the wake of approximately 50,000-60,000 migrants rushing into the small Spanish territory of Ceuta from the Moroccan border last week asked for the intercession of Our Lady of Africa, the patroness of the city, to spur the “Reconquista” of Morocco to Catholicism.
The priest also called for all “Arab colonizers” to be expelled from the northern region of the African country, called “Mauretania Tingitana” by the ancient Romans, and reclaim the original “Roman Hispania.”
“May Our Lady of Africa, patron saint of Ceuta, spur the reconquest of Morocco and its conversion to Christianity,” the priest wrote in one of the now-deleted posts. “Let us finish what Queen Isabella the Catholic left undone.”
“We must reconquer Mauritania Tingitana and expel all the Arab colonizers. Let only the (native) Berbers remain,” he wrote in another post.
“Roman Hispania … the original Spain … the Spain we must reclaim. Let the Arab invaders of our Tingitan Mauritania return to the Arabian Peninsula – from where they should never have left – and give us back our land,” he added.
During last week’s migrant surge, over 50,000 migrants crossed into Ceuta illegally, more than half of the city’s population, between July 30 and 31, with at least 86 people dying during the surge, mostly by drowning while trying to swim onto the Spanish shores.
The Daily Mailreported that the situation even led to unrest, with locals taking to the streets to protest and push back the trespassers.
“Many were seen waving Spanish flags and screaming at them,” the Mail reported. “As a group of migrants were seen running away, a loud police siren was heard in the background.” The National Police union Jupol issued a statement bemoaning the “clear lack of personnel and material resources” to deal with the situation.
The Spanish government eventually sent troops on Friday to “reinforce the Civil Guard in the exercise of its powers and any others that may be necessary to maintain security in the city of Ceuta,” the interior ministry said, and would be working with the Moroccan government to return the migrants “as soon as possible.”
The mass border rush was so devastating that even leftist Spain Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez denounced the incident as “a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity.” Most of the migrants have since left the city voluntarily, according to officials.
While Catholic social teaching affirms that immigrants should be treated with dignity and respect, it also notes that a country has a right to secure its borders. In the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “Catholic Social Teaching on Immigration and the Movement of Peoples,” the conference outlines that countries are under no obligation to accept all who wish to enter.
Since last week’s deadly migrant surge, Archbishop Luis Argüello, president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, sharply criticized the recent influx of illegal immigrants into Spanish territory as part of a strategy by “global powers” in which migrants are “exploited for the sake of profit and power.”
“Biopolitics is key to current global power. Life is toyed with, and people – their dreams, hunger, sexuality, and data – are exploited for the sake of profit and power,” Argüello wrote Sunday on X.
A clip of Bishop Athanasius Schneider’s previous remarks on the “invasion” of Islamic migrants into Europe, who are destroying its Christian heritage, played alongside footage of last week’s surge has also resurfaced across social media in recent days.
“Now we are witnessing an invasion. They are not refugees – no – this is an invasion of the mass Islamization of Europe,” the bishop said in a brief clip. “And so this is a global political agenda by the powerful of the world: to destroy Europe culturally and religiously — to destroy Christianity ultimately in Europe.”
Bishop Schneider: "They are not refugees, they're invaders who want to Islamize Europe. They want to destroy Europe's religion and culture." pic.twitter.com/vsblccWr8D
The story of ‘Cambridge Professor Jason Arday’ is a reminder that prestigious UK universities have gone as stupidly woke as American ones and have replaced actual intellectuals with woke ‘public intellectuals’ who fit the right DEI profile.
Here’s a sampling of Arday’s backstory.
Cambridge professor claimed he was on TV show… decades before he was born – The Telegraph
I couldn’t have finished a PhD two weeks after my brain surgery. But I’m not Jason Arday – The Telegraph
Charity casts doubts on volunteering record of Cambridge professor – The Telegraph
Cambridge’s diversity poster boy faces questions over ‘miracle’ 600-mile run – The Telegraph
The University of Cambridge is publicly calling the plagiarism allegations against Jason Arday “a vile campaign.” The Good Law Project published a petition calling the plagiarism allegations “entirely false,” gathering signatures from politicians including MPs John McDonnell, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, and Clive Lewis, as well as Lord Paul Boateng and Cambridge college principals. The open letter, which had already drawn more than 10,000 signatories, argues that Arday — the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s nearly 1,000-year history — is being targeted because of his race.
Cambridge’s response also invoked a panel finding from Liverpool John Moores University, the institution that awarded Arday his 2015 PhD, which concluded in March 2026 that citation issues were the result of “honest and reasonable error” and that textual overlap with Paula Zwozdiak-Myers’s work was “well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time.” Neither Liverpool John Moores nor Cambridge has engaged with the specific finding published by The Telegraph in July 2026: that a fresh statistical analysis identified 188 sentences in Arday’s thesis that are identical or highly similar to Zwozdiak-Myers’s 2009 thesis, with statisticians placing the probability of chance overlap at one in 100 billion.
In 2023, he famously became Cambridge’s youngest black professor—an enviable appointment in British academia that is equivalent to receiving an endowed chair in the United States and is typically granted only to elite academics after years of scholarly output—studying race in higher education. All this despite, according to his claims, having grown up in the British equivalent of a housing project and with autism so severe that he didn’t speak until age 11 or learn to read until he was 18.
In a 2023 podcast, Arday, who writes about the “decolonization” of academia, claimed that in 2017 he was “awarded” a Member of the Order of the British Empire for his charity work, which he said he turned down due to his critiques of empire. The 2017 London Gazette honours lists make no mention of an award to Arday, and there are no public reports that he was ever offered an MBE.
So the non-wokes are having a good laugh at Arday’s wild claims and how long they were tolerated, but what’s deeply disturbing is the role of British authorities in intimidating and suppressing critics.
Scotland Yard investigated a journalist trying to expose a plagiarism row and told him to stop asking a Cambridge professor questions.
Jack Grove, a reporter for Times Higher Education (THE), was accused of harassment after he emailed a series of questions to Prof Jason Arday about his academic record. Mr Grove said officers told him to stop contacting the professor because his “mental health” had been affected by the questions.
Prof Arday also hired the law firm Carter-Ruck, which suggested in a letter to THE that its “apparent attack” on him “may be… racially motivated”.
The Metropolitan Police spent four months looking into the claim of harassment before deciding in February to close the case.
Would the Met have acted this way if a conservative academic had complained about a Guardian reporter? I doubt it.
The UK authorities routinely intimidate private citizens and journalists to warn them against speech involving Islamists and Leftists. This 1984ish state of affairs is deeply disturbing and typical of the totalitarian system that the United Kingdom is becoming.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government in Rome has called on the European Union to establish migrant return hubs in Africa in the wake of last week’s Ceuta border crisis.
At a meeting of EU interior ministers on Tuesday, the Meloni government in Rome argued that the “Albanian model” should be adopted more broadly for the entire bloc and that asylum processing centres should be established and funded by Brussels in Africa to stem the tide of illegal migration across the Mediterranean.
Meloni’s government has been successful in driving down the number of illegal migrants arriving by boat, with 16,732 aliens reaching Italian shores so far this year. This is compared to 34,737 and 36,978 at this time of year in 2024 and 2025, respectively. Overall, illegal sea arrivals declined from their 2023 peak of 157,651 to 66,617 in 2024 and 66,316 in 2025, with numbers expected to decline even further this year.
This came despite Rome’s central deterrence strategy of immediately sending illegal boat migrants to asylum processing centres in Albania being held up in legal limbo following activist attorney challenges in Italy and the intervention of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which is expected to provide a final ruling on the plan next month after years of legal wrangling.
However, following significant lobbying by Meloni’s faction, the European Parliament passed legislation in June that cleared the way for EU member states to establish third-country migrant return hubs, a move inspired by the Albanian model.
On Tuesday, in an emergency virtual meeting called in the wake of the Ceuta crisis in which tens of thousands of illegals stormed the border of the Spanish exclave from neighbouring Morocco last week, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi laid out Meloni’s vision for adopting the plan at an EU level, in which migrant return hubs could be established in Africa and elsewhere in exchange for preferential trade agreements with host countries.
According to Il Giornale, Rome identified Ethiopia, Ghana, Mauritania, Senegal, and Uganda as potential candidates in Africa, as well as Montenegro in the Balkans and Uzbekistan in Central Asia. Piantedosi argued that this would make deportations more efficient and would serve as a deterrent against future illegal migration to Europe.
Meloni has already shown some success in negotiating with African interlocutors, having previously led EU agreements with Libya and Tunisia to increase their efforts to crack down on people-smuggling networks operating along their coastlines.
Meloni’s migrant return hub plan appears to have broad support, with liberal Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen serving as a key partner to Meloni in advocating for a broader EU adoption of the Albania model. Other major players, including Austria, Greece, and Germany, are all said to be interested in establishing “pilot” programs in third-party countries deemed “safe”.
Il Giornale also reported that EU chief Ursula von der Leyen—whom Meloni has long sought to court as an ally during her tenure—has given her stamp of approval. She is said to be looking for a “common response” and is reportedly “ready to evaluate complete proposals, based on strategic cooperation”.
Should Meloni strike an EU-wide agreement on her plan, it would likely bolster her image as an effective leader and bolster her governing coalition as she heads into a contentious re-election campaign in 2027.
Although her government has reduced the number of illegal arrivals, lacklustre deportation figures have left room for ex-political ally and former Italian Army general Roberto Vannacci to set up a rival right-wing party, National Future, which advocates a hardline “remigration” stance from Rome. If Meloni succeeds in crafting a migrant return hub agreement, it may serve to undermine the challenge to her right.
However, Italy is not the only EU country set to hold critical elections next year, with voters in France and Spain also set to head to the polls in 2027.
While combating the migrant crisis is clearly in Meloni’s political interests, it is unclear whether that is the case for outgoing French President Emmanuel Macron or Socialist Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
Indeed, despite broad support for mass deportations in France, the globalist lame duck has come out as a leading opponent of the plan. Following the EU Parliament vote backing the establishment of third-country migrant return hubs, Macron claimed the idea went against the principles of “Europe” and said France would not participate in any such plan.
Furthermore, the former Rothschild banker said that Paris would also “oppose the use of the European budget” to fund any migrant return centres, claiming that it would damage the EU’s reputation in Africa.
For his part, Prime Minister Sánchez, whose government is in the process of granting amnesty to upwards of a million illegal migrants and which recently oversaw the “invasion” of Spanish territory by over 70,000 aliens in less than a day, has also come out in opposition to migrant return hubs, claiming that they are “not effective” and “contrary to the values of the EU”.
With immigration likely to dominate the presidential election in France next April and the parliamentary elections in Spain next August, it remains to be seen whether the opposition in Madrid and Paris will hold, given that anti-mass-migration parties are currently favoured to win both contests.
A Brazilian influencer has been handed a two-year prison sentence after using male pronouns to refer to a transgender politician. Bianca Barreto received her sentence from the 9th Criminal Court of Salvador on July 29, after she was found guilty of the “intentional and pejorative use of the gender opposite… [to a] self-declared identity.”
The sentence follows a lengthy case stemming from a 2024 video posted to social media by Barreto. In the video, she criticized Duda Salabert, a member of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies. Salabert is a member of the left-wing Socialism and Liberty Party, and was one of the first openly trans-identified people to be elected to the Chamber, serving since 2022.
Barreto’s video described an earlier case involving Salabert and conservative parliamentarian Nikolas Ferreira. Ferreira, another member of the Chamber of Deputies, stood in the same election as Salabert in 2020 to be a local councillor for the city of Belo Horizonte. At the time, Salabert was the first trans-identified person to run for office to the city council.
“He is a man. That’s what’s on his birth certificate, regardless of what he thinks,” he said, while in another interview saying he wasn’t worried about being sued by Salabert for his remarks. “It’s biology. I’m not saying something I think. He is a man. And it’s important to make it clear that there is no criminalization related to biology,” he added.
However, Salabert did file a criminal complaint against Ferreira, referencing the fact that Brazil’s Supreme Court had classified transphobia and homophobia as crimes of “social racism” since 2019. The case was later dismissed on procedural grounds, but in a separate civil action, Ferreira was forced to pay R$80,000 in 2023, equivalent to around $15,500 USD, reduced on appeal to R$30,000.
Barreto discussed the case against Ferreira in her video in 2024, telling her audience that they “must have already heard of Congressman Duda Salabert,” adding that “he’s a guy who says he’s a trans woman, but he’s married to a woman and has a son or daughter.” She continued, saying that whatever “she does in her private life is not my problem. Now, it will always be a problem when these people try to impose things on us that are not real, that are a product of her imagination. By ‘her’ I mean the person, because a man is a man, a woman is a woman, and that’s it.”
In a written summary displayed throughout the video, Barreto repeated how it was insane that someone was being sued “for calling a man a man.”
But her remarks on the case against Ferreira ultimately led to her own prosecution, and Salabert filed a criminal complaint against Barreto as well.
Barreto argued in court that her content was legitimate political discourse, and that as a Christian she had the right to advocate for candidates that share her values, but that she was neither encouraging violence against nor hating trans-identified individuals.
The judge disagreed, claiming that it is a form of “marginalization” to refer to trans-identified individuals with masculine pronouns. Citing the 2019 Supreme Court ruling, the judge argued that the recognition of self-declared gender identity is completely mandatory in Brazil, because it is an “inseparable element of personality rights and the dignity of the human person.” The judge added that “the deliberate use of biological sex at birth to ridicule and disqualify the social identity of a trans woman in a public arena is not merely an exercise of opinion; it is an act that refuses to recognize her citizenship.”
Barreto’s sentence will be served in the “open” system, which is similar to house arrest in that her movement will be restricted and she will be required to check in with a police officer or judge regularly. Barreto was also forced to pay damages of R$20,000, which is around $3,800 USD.
The conviction of Barreto follows another high-profile case in Brazil, that of women’s rights activist Isabella Cêpa, who was granted refugee status in Europe after facing the possibility of a prison sentence for referring to another trans-identified politician as a man. As Reduxx previously reported, Cêpa was facing five counts under the “social racism” statutes, which could have carried a sentence of 25 years, after describing candidate Felipe Santos Silva as a man in the 2020 São Paulo municipal elections.
Silva, who also goes by the name Erika Hilton, reported the women’s rights activist to the police, with European authorities in August of 2025 accepting that Cêpa had a well-founded fear of persecution on account of her political beliefs, granting her protection. Luckily for Cêpa, the complaint was forcibly dropped for good just one month later, after Justice Gilmar Mendes in Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that calling Hilton a “man” does not constitute a hate crime, and refused to re-open the criminal case after it had been previously dismissed.
Ironically, Silva, who was elected along with Salabert to the Chamber of Deputies in 2022 as the other trans-identified candidate, was promoted to the president of the Women’s Rights Committee in March this year. He argued that the parliamentary committee must focus on women “without exception in their dignity and plurality,” even including transvestites in his definition.
In a statement, Barreto’s legal team said they would appeal the decision, as they believe it “does not correspond to the legal understanding of the defense regarding the facts and evidence contained in the case file,” and that therefore “all applicable appeal measures will be taken within the legal timeframe, with the aim of submitting the matter to the competent authorities for review.”
Barreto’s team further noted that they remain convinced that the case should be analyzed in light of the fundamental guarantees provided for in the Federal Constitution, especially the freedoms of expression, conscience, belief, and religious manifestation, the scope and application of which will be duly presented within the appropriate procedural framework.”
MATRIA has recently released a short documentary about the negative impacts of gender identity ideology on women and children in Brazil and in the world.
“Bianca Barreto’s conviction represents another step in a growing series of court decisions that are imposing on society—and especially on women—the obligation to refer to men as women under the threat of criminal sanctions, something that is only happening in Brazil,” Saadi says.
“Referring to someone as ‘sir’ or using masculine pronouns for a man is a basic rule of language and should not be treated as an offense. These are ordinary forms of address in Portuguese and refer to the objective perception of a person’s sex. If stating that a male person is a man can be treated as a crime, then the State is punishing people for describing reality,” she continued.
“The State should not require everyone to adopt a particular view of sex, gender identity, and language, nor should it turn the acknowledgment of reality into a criminal offense.”
