Month: June 2022

Spain is not only one of the European countries where the Corona hysteria was successfully enacted, but also the fifth most indebted country in the world. State bankruptcy seems to be just around the corner. That is why the left-wing socialist government is in the process of passing a law allowing expropriations of private property and a “corralito”.

The latter means that the state can access the savings people have in their bank accounts. In such “crisis situations”, the citizen would only have the right to withdraw smaller sums. The rest of the money could be “temporarily” confiscated. The maximum amount would be determined by the authority of the respective country, the portal La Información explained in March 2021.

At that time, the portal still claimed that this would only affect sums over 100 000 euros. But that is water under the bridge: On 26 May 2022, the left-wing socialist government of Pedro Sánchez announced that the tax authorities could now confiscate all savings exceeding the minimum wage.

A “corralito” could be ordered from one day to the next, just as it has already been carried out in Argentina, Cyprus, Greece or recently in Sri Lanka, Spanish lawyer Aitor Guisasola warned last week.

No exaggeration

Is the lawyer exaggerating in his assessment? Not necessarily, since Spain’s public spending is extremely high and inflation is rising just as rapidly as the national debt. As early as May 2021, the financial journal El Economistareported that Spain’s public debt had risen to 125,3 percent of GDP and had reached a peak not seen since 1881.

Not surprisingly, the situation has deteriorated further. On 17 May 2022, the Spanish mainstream let it be known that the national debt had reached its highest level ever in March: 1,45 trillion euros.

“Spain is finished,” Guisasola stated. He believes the possibility of preventing national bankruptcy is now almost impossible. The American Janus Capital Group and the British Henderson Global Investor, concluded that Spain was one of the countries whose public debt has grown the most in recent years.

In fact, Spain’s public debt has grown by 347 percent since 1995 , three times faster than its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Henderson actually pointed out that Spain was the fourth most indebted country in the world and the year 2020 alone was comparable to eight years of indebtedness.

“Compared to the size of the world economy, debt levels have reached their peak (…) It is incredible that more than half of the new government securities in 2020 were financed with newly created cash by central banks.” If foreign investors jump ship in Spain and exchange rates fall, the country can quickly slip into a debt crisis and go bankrupt.

In the case of bankruptcy, a government in such a precarious situation would have to initiate refinancing through further public debt. However, the European Central Bank already announced in March this year that it would not buy any more debt. Moreover, interest rates have already been raised.

https://freewestmedia.com/2022/06/03/is-spain-on-the-verge-of-national-bankruptcy/

More surveillance, more resources against “disinformation” and less free speech were the themes of the Wednesday conference of interior ministers from Germany’s federal and state governments.

“We need more measures against misleading and demonstrably false information,” said Bavarian Minister of the Interior Joachim Herrmann, of the Christian Socialist Union, who is taking over the presidency.

Herrmann demanded that users should only be allowed to use their real names on social networks, effectively ending anonymity. He demanded that social media and web providers should be forced to verify the authenticity of the identity of their users. In addition, a paper produced by the interior ministers requires them to provide a “decrypted dump” of content in the event of an investigation against subjects.

The calls to end anonymity on the internet come despite Germany’s troubled past, in which members of the German resistance, including the White Rose, wrote anti-Nazi pamphlets under a pen name before they were caught and executed towards the end of the war. In East Germany and other communist-era nations, which featured surveillance capabilities that pale in comparison to modern Germany, opposition and pro-democracy activists actively published anonymous, illegal texts known as samizdat. Although hunted down and arrested at the time, these writers and dissidents are now seen as “freedom fighters” and praised by many of the same current political leaders and journalists pushing for mass censorship and surveillance.

“Hate crimes on the Internet pose a great danger to peaceful coexistence in a free, open, and democratic society,” said Nancy Faeser (SPD), Germany’s current federal interior minister. To combat these hate crimes, data retention is also necessary, she added.

As Remix News has previously reported, the far-left Faeser is leading a campaign against “far-right extremism,” arguing this fight should already begin in kindergarten. Despite evidence showing left-wing violence is a larger threat, she claims right-wing elements are actually the biggest threat to the German state. She has been criticized for writing in the far-left Antifa magazine, which was funded by a designated extremist organization, shortly before coming to power, but that has done little to rein in her agenda. She instead has put forth a 10-point plan to fight “right-wing extremism” which in many ways appears to be a blanket effort to target any conservative thought or dissent.

In addition, despite the German government in the past applauding the use of Belarusians using Telegram to fight against Aleksandr Lukashenko, both she and the previous government under Merkel have ramped up efforts to ban the platform entirely due to its free speech policy.

What disinformation actually remains is very unclear, but much of the focus appears to be on combating “hate speech” on the web; this could cover illegal hate symbols such as the swastika, but could also include legitimate dissent and criticism of government policy, including on topics related to religion, abortion, LGBT issues, and coronavirus policy. As Remix News previously reported, “hate speech” is a tenuous concept in many cases and increasingly applied to a wide range of conservative beliefs:

The question then becomes what defines a hate crime on the web? Obvious calls to violence will undoubtedly be prosecuted, but what about criticism of mass migration or pointing out foreign overrepresentation in German crime statistics, especially for serious crimes like rape – just to name two potential examples. Will such criticisms constitute hate crimes?

The reality is that this law will most surely be abused if the past is any guide. Take, for instance, the recent case of Berlin’s left-wing mayor, Michael Müller, of the Social Democrat party (SPD), who ordered a police raid on a Facebook user for posting an immigration-critical photo that targeted Müller:

The case dates back to April 14, 2019, when a Facebook user under the name of “Karina Fitza” shared a doctored photo of Mayor Michael Müller, which suggested he wanted to relocate all of the migrants who’ve been picked up by NGO ships to Berlin.

The shared image, which the woman had discovered earlier on Twitter, clearly offended the Social Democratic mayor, prompting him to contact Berlin’s Chief Prosecutor Jöorg Raupach and demand that criminal action be taken against the social media user. Earlier this month, the letter sent to Raupach from Müller — titled “Criminal complaint by the superior” — was made public in a report published by the German newspaper Die Welt.

After determining Karina Fitza’s real identity, the public prosecutor’s office easily obtained a warrant from a district judge to search the woman’s home. On the morning of Feb. 20, 2020, at 6 a.m., five officers from the State Criminal Police Office (LKA) conducted a raid on the woman’s apartment and seized two mobile telephones and two tablets. According to a report from Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg 24, the woman now suffers from a sleep disorder as a result of the trauma she was forced to experience on the day of the early morning raid.

In a country gearing up new plans to accept hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year, are those who reject such a society-altering plan and create content protesting it on social media about to be charged criminally, or even worse, have their houses raided?

German police have also taken a heavy-handed approach against free speech, raiding over 100 homes over “insulting” speech under the broader banner of “hate speech” directed against politicians, with some of those raids criticized as egregious violations of civil liberties.

Nevertheless, several draft resolutions prepared during the interior ministers’ conference on Wednesday will deal with hate speech on the internet, with Bavaria’s interior minister stating that anyone who becomes radicalized must be identified early through “extensive, electronically supported information gathering” — in other words, mass surveillance.

Germany’s left-wing government, with the aid of the country’s state interior ministers, are also looking to increasingly criminalize “misinformation.”

“The deliberate and targeted spreading of lies to divide and spread hatred is not an expression of opinion worthy of protection,” Herrmann argued to justify the procedure. “Misleading and false information endangers our democracy.”

In his view, the targeted dissemination of disinformation should be punishable under certain conditions. That also applies to comparable facts such as incitement to hatred or the approval of a war of aggression, which would likely apply to anyone who takes Russia’s side in the conflict in Ukraine.

However, the Bavarian interior minister’s plans and the rest of the government may come into conflict with Germany’s constitution and current case law as it stands in the Federal Constitutional Court, which expressly places false information under the protection of freedom of expression.

https://rmx.news/article/censorship-regime-german-interior-ministers-call-for-end-of-anonymity-on-web-more-surveillance-and-new-laws-against-hate-speech/

UPDATE

The man was extremely aggressive towards the police officers. According to the daily newspaper "Heute", the man insisted that he was not Austrian but Syrian and demanded an "Arabic interrogation".

At the Vienna Praterstern railway station on Thursday evening, an Austrian citizen (19) threatened and insulted three girls aged 15 to 18. They were told to dress more modestly and put on a headscarf. The “guardian of public morals” chased the three young women from the underground station Praterstern to Schwedenplatz. There he pulled out a knife, kicked them and put one of the victims (17) in a headlock. The women then called the police.

The man was extremely aggressive towards the police officers. A small amount of cannabis was seized from the suspect during the arrest. The Austrian, who was known to the police, was arrested and charged with suspicion of dangerous threat, attempted bodily harm and violation of the Narcotic Substances Act. The victims suffered no physical injuries as a result of the incident.

https://exxpress.at/sittenwaechter-bedrohte-frauen-in-wien-sie-sollten-kopftuch-tragen/

Geneticists admitted that they had been “really surprised” after a gene-editing experiment with the CRISPR/Cas9 technique went horribly wrong. They had instead turned the hamsters they had been injecting with their potion into hyper-aggressive monsters.

CRISPR/Cas9 edits genes by precisely cutting DNA and then letting natural DNA repair processes take over. The system consists of two parts: the Cas9 enzyme and a guide RNA which is supposed to enable “transformative therapies”. It is supposed to be “a simple two-component system” used for “effective” targeted gene editing. Clearly, this definition does not apply in many cases as this outcome revealed.

The “counterintuitive results” show that the scientists “ don’t understand this system as well as we thought,” the lead researcher admitted.

By eliminating vasopressin activity the researchers had hoped it would make hamsters behave more peacefully. According to a statement from Georgia State University (GSU), a team of neuroscience researchers were however “really surprised” by the results of a gene-editing experiment that unexpectedly created hyper-aggressive hamsters.

The GSU research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), aimed to better understand the biology of mammalian social behavior.

Scientists used Syrian hamsters to experiment with CRISPR/Cas9,  and eliminated a receptor for vasopressin, a hormone associated with increased aggression. Scientists believed that by doing so, they would “radically” change the social behavior of Syrian hamsters, making them more calm. Their behavior certainly changed… for the worse.

“We were really surprised by the results,” said GSU ​​professor H. Elliott Albers, the study’s lead author. “We predicted that if we eliminated vasopressin activity, we would reduce both aggression and social communication, but the opposite happened”. Hamsters lacking the receptor displayed “high levels of aggression” towards same-sex hamsters compared to their counterparts with intact receptors, the study says.

“This suggests a surprising conclusion. Although we know that vasopressin increases social behaviors by acting in a number of brain regions, it is possible that the more global effects of the Avpr1a receptor are inhibitory.”

Developing genetically modified hamsters has “not been easy,” Albers said. He added that the role of vasopressin in social behavior is essential to understand new treatment strategies for patients.

As a rule, hamsters are very territorial and intolerant of each other; attacks against each other are commonplace. Same-sex groups of siblings can stay with each other until they are about eight weeks old, at which point they will become territorial and fight with one another, sometimes to the death.

In March 2020, researchers from the University of Hong Kong maintained that Syrian hamsters could be a model organism for Covid-19 research.

The use of CRISPR/Cas9 in humans is a significant step away from treating cells in a dish, according to Fyodor Urnov, who studies genome editing at the University of California, Berkeley. “It is akin to space flight versus a regular plane trip. But last year Urnov warned that the “technical challenges, and inherent safety concerns, are much greater”.

https://freewestmedia.com/2022/06/02/genetics-scientists-wanted-friendly-hamsters-but-made-them-much-more-aggressive/

More than 750,000 people have joined the national gun registry and have obtained a so-called “small firearm license,” in Germany, as ownership of firearms becomes ever more popular in the country.

However, it is important to note that gun restrictions remain stringent in Germany, and a “small firearm license” does not allow individuals to buy a pistol or sidearm that can shoot real bullets. Instead, individuals with this specific license can carry gas pistols that can shoot blanks or irritants as well as flare guns.

As of April 30, 756,619 people were registered to own a small firearm, with 16,581 people having already joined this year alone, according to Zeit Online. Last year, this number already increased by 34,532.

Despite the non-lethal nature of these “small firearms,” left-wing parties are eyeing the steady increase of such weapons warily. Gun ownership, at least in the United States, is highly associated with voting patterns that support the conservative political candidates. If gun ownership were to become more popular in Germany, parties like the conservative Alternative for Germany (AfD) could theoretically benefit.

“We take that very seriously. The security authorities are very vigilant,” the domestic policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, Dirk Wiese, told the Rheinische Post.

Despite the already strict German weapons law, Wiese said that a close look must be taken “to make legislative adjustments if necessary,” and then demanding the use of existing control options need to be applied more stringently.

When asked to attribute a reason for the significant increase in those on the register, Wiese could only guess whether there was a connection with the Ukraine war, as applicants are not required to state their motive for requesting such a license.

However, the conflict in Ukraine may have little to do with the increase. For one, “small firearms” are unlikely to be effective against a Russian invasion, and furthermore, the number of people applying for such a license was already rapidly increasing before the conflict in Ukraine. In general, such small firearms are seen as a non-lethal weapon for personal self defense.

The greatest increase was seen in 2016, the same year as the migrant crisis in Germany broke out, which saw a whopping 470,000 Germans receive a small firearm license in just one year. In some areas of Germany, serious crimes such as rape are increasing, and statistics also show that foreigners are committing a highly disproportionate amount of crimes, including serious assaults, murder and sexual violence. As Remix News reported, gang rapes in Germany have more than doubled to 677 in 2021 compared to three years ago in 2018.

The small gun license was introduced with an amendment to the Weapons Act in 2003 and has enjoyed growing popularity ever since. The small gun license is not to be confused with the gun ownership license, which hunters, marksmen, and collectors have and entitles them to own rifles and pistols.

https://rmx.news/article/germans-get-small-firearm-fever-but-left-wing-parties-like-the-spd-are-concerned/

Their French neighbours are much more likely to have their bicycles stolen, according to a study. Bicycle sales have moreover increased considerably in Switzerland: +33,7 percent between 2019 and 2021, reaching 5666 bicycles sold per 100 000 inhabitants in 2021.

During the pandemic, despite the rise in cyclists, bicycle theft decreased significantly in Switzerland and Belgium. Against all expectations, it increased in France.

The year 2020 was a record year: the turnover of the bicycle industry in Switzerland reached 2,3 billion francs, according to Velosuisse. The electric bike in particular is driving sales upwards. In 2021, there was a slight overall decline of 1,5 percent, but an increase of 9,4 percent for electric bicycles.

But the evolution of theft before and after the pandemic was not identical in these countries: Switzerland: -20,51 percent, Belgium: -65,72 percent France: +5,69 percent.

The leftwing Mayor of Paris in 2014 declared that she would be transforming the city into a “world cycling capital”, with an investment of more than €150m and doubling the number of lanes. The city boasts the most cyclists.

But cycling-friendly Paris is not friendly to cyclists: 15 times more bicycles are stolen in France than in Switzerland. This is the finding of a study published on Tuesday. It was carried out by two insurance brokers, HelloSafe and Réassurez-moi, to compare the bicycle market in France, Belgium and Switzerland.

“The data is specific to each country from 2016 to 2021 and is based on an index of 100 000 inhabitants for the sake of proportionality between these different countries. This study is based on information from public and private sources.”

The meteoric rise in theft should be viewed against the backdrop of the recent violence at the Stade de France in migrant-dominated Seine-Saint-Denis, in Paris. The no-go area has been reduced to delinquents and has become one of the pockets of misery in the French capital with tens of thousands of migrants who camp along the canal two hundred meters from the stadium.

Saint-Denis is known for its migrant crime, with high rates of robbery, drug offences and murder. In 2005 already it had 15 071 criminal incidents per 100 000 inhabitants, far higher than the national average (8 300 per 100 000). Not only soccer fans, but cyclists are on the receiving end.

https://freewestmedia.com/2022/06/02/fifteen-times-fewer-bicycles-stolen-in-switzerland-than-in-france/