Month: June 2023
‘Unbelievable betrayal!’ Czech opposition calls for extraordinary meeting after government approves EU migration reform
Members of the Czech opposition have requested an extraordinary session in parliament to object to Interior Minister Vít Rakušan voting through the EU’s planned mandatory migrant relocation scheme.
Both ANO leader Andrej Babiš and SPD leader Tomio Okamura have criticized the Czech government for signing off on the migration reforms proposed by Brussels, regarding it as a betrayal to the country.
Czechia was part of a cohort of EU nations seeking to block the radical plans that will mean member states must accept their fair share of migrants entering the bloc or face a hefty fine for each individual refused access.
However, along with Italy and a number of other opponents, Rakušan backed off his initial position and waved the plans through after late-night talks in Luxembourg on Thursday. Only Poland and Hungary held firm in their opposition to the reforms, while Bulgaria, Malta, Lithuania and Slovakia all abstained.
“We negotiated a fair joint solution, which we sought and actively promoted. No quotas, but financial aid to the most burdened member countries, which the Czech Republic has been implementing for a long time through the programs of the Ministry of the Interior,” Rakušan said in a press release on Friday.
It is understood that Czechia will be temporarily excluded from the mandatory migrant relocation scheme due to its humanitarian response during the Ukraine conflict and the influx of refugees it received.
The opposition ANO movement, however, criticized Rakušan for rowing back on his position.
“Six years ago we rejected quotas for the redistribution of migrants. It took many hours of hard work, but we did it. Now the minister has trampled on that victorious fight,” Mračková Vildumetzová, the shadow interior minister tweeted on Friday.
Babiš went further, calling it “an incredible betrayal, an incredible failure of our government, which is servile to Brussels.”
“The Czech Republic should decide for itself who will live in it,” he added, warning that his party would not forget the matter and suggesting it will make effective ammunition for the European elections next year.
Okamura told colleagues that Rakušan “did not have the slightest mandate to secretly approve this fundamental and long-term commitment for the Czech Republic,” and claimed the matter had not been discussed in advance in parliament or with the parliamentary opposition.
Both the Hungarian and Polish governments criticized the reforms on Friday, with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki vowing not to pay any financial penalty imposed on his country by Brussels, and Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán accusing the European Commission of wanting to “turn Hungary into an immigration country by force.”
Ukrainian oil company Burisma, of which Hunter Biden was a Board member, paid $5 million to Joe Biden when he was US VP: Reports
A Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant has alleged that one of the largest natural gas producers in Ukraine, Burisma Holdings, paid $5 million (~₹41 crores) to Joe Biden between 2015 and 2016.
The whistleblower made the revelations during an interview with the FBI in June 2020, which the agency recorded in an FD-1023 form (used to record unverified information from confidential sources). It must be mentioned that Joe Biden was serving as the Vice-President of the United States at that time.
Interestingly, Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden was a member of the Board of Burisma Holdings during the same period. The highly credible informant told the FBI that the alleged payment of $5 million was made to facilitate the company’s entry into the US oil and natural gas market.
He alleged that the high-level ‘criminal bribery scheme’ involved an executive of Burisma Holdings who had influence over the US policy decisions, despite being a foreign national.
Reportedly, the Burisma executive believed Hunter Biden is ‘dumb’ and thus sought counsel from the whistleblower on getting involved with a US oil firm and gaining US oil rights.
He also conceded ‘paying the Bidens’ as Burisma Holdings was under investigation in Ukraine at that time, thus making it difficult for the company to gain access to the US market. “$5 million for one Biden, $5 million for the other Biden,” the Burisma executive had told the whistleblower.
He also revealed that the payments were routed through different bank accounts such that it would take at least 10 years for investigators to unravel the source. The executive, however, made it clear that the alleged payment of $5 million was not made directly to the ‘Big Guy’ (a supposed reference to Joe Biden).
Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who had seen the FBI document, told American conservative host, Benny Johnson, “And so what I can say is this is: This has been going on for many years and there was a 5 million dollar payment made to Joe Biden. Not Hunter Biden, Joe Biden – The Big Guy.”
According to Fox News Digital, the whistleblower is a regular, reliable source of information used by the FBI since 2010. He has been paid $2,00,000 (~1.64 crores) for his work.
Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee (the primary investigative committee of the US House of Representatives) subpoenaed the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the FD-1023 document. As per reports, the agency has offered to allow all members of the committee to view the contentious document.
US President Joe Biden has dismissed the allegations made by the whistleblower to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. On being quizzed about the matter, he said, “Where’s the money? It’s a bunch of malarkey”
The controversy surrounding Hunter Biden and his laptop
It is notable here that in the last weeks of the 2020 US presidential elections, the New York Post published an explosive story about Hunter Biden’s problematic emails with a Ukrainian gas company executive from Burisma.
In its report, the news outlet alleged that they had accessed material from a damaged Macbook that was brought to a service centre for repair. The customer who brought the laptop never collected or paid for the services.
The shop owner said he repeatedly tried to contact the client. Though he could not identify the owner as Hunter Biden, he said the laptop had Beau Biden Foundation’s sticker.
The report has several documents and mentions a video that proves that Joe Biden met a high-profile businessman from Ukraine when he was Vice President of the United States.
Reports suggested that Biden may have helped his son Hunter, using his influence as the VP of the United States, in his business in Ukraine. The Biden Camp categorically denied all the allegations.
The story was heavily censored by both Twitter and Facebook and was branded as a piece of fake news. Initially, the report was dismissed as a hoax by Biden-supporting media, but it was eventually confirmed that the laptop’s contents did really belong to Hunter Biden.
Following the restriction of the NYP report, Twitter justified the action by claiming that its policies forbid the sharing of compromised information. After the elections were over and Joe Biden was declared president, it became clear that the NY Post story was indeed true.
Twitter’s former head Jack Dorsey then expressed regret over censoring the story and blocking New York Post from their Twitter account.
https://www.opindia.com/2023/06/us-president-joe-biden-5-million-bribe-burisma-ukraine-oil-company/
Let’s talk climate scares and wildfires
By John Dale Dunn
The latest panic climate talk is amplified because of the smoke from Canadian fires that is drifting to the East, as all American weather does, to produce smoke in East Coast cities and create air quality advisories and pearl-clutching. California wildfires in the recent past did not produce any measurable uptick in deaths or illnesses, but no matter: another crisis is currently besetting the lefty havens of the East Coast.
A New Wildfire Study Scam
A new study was released May 16 by researchers of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Cambridge, MA 200-thousand-member, 50-million-dollar-a-year environmentalist non-profit, that attempts to prove up the argument that the planet will warm up 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) resulting from atmospheric CO2 increases above the current 410 parts per million. This paper jumps on the scare bandwagon and claims the warming will reduce humidity (they use the words vapor pressure) and that will burn more forests down.
The paper tries hard to look very scientific, but the argument is simple: warming will dry the air and leech water from the vegetation, causing it to be better fuel for forest fires. In other words, shame on the fossil fuel users and producers; it’s their fault.
Ed Ring does a nice job in his essay of May 24 at American Greatness taking down the arguments of the greenies and putting up a better explanation for wildfires that notes the obvious: increased wildfires are because of empty-headed enviro policies that reduce proper forestry culling of thick growth and reduce logging. For example, in California, environmentalism has ended thinning efforts for forest growth, including reducing logging to one third of what it was in the recent past.
Mr. Ring reviews the pretentions of these green propagandist pseudo-scientists:
- They don’t stick to their research and fill up the introduction with the typical anti–fossil fuel rhetoric condemning all aspects of modern energy production based on fossil fuels.
- They ignore droughts — even centuries-long droughts that have been a reality over the eons in the western part of North America.
- The graphics and the arguments in the Union paper claim hot weather as their ground for the wildfire claims, resulting in an exaggerated negative humidity effect, but even if one excepts the claim of greenhouse gas effects of warming of less than 2 degrees C (3.7 degrees F), that creates a small — less than 4% — change in relative humidity.
- The authors fail to consider the equilibrium thermodynamics that result from adding energy (temperature) to the planet. Warming will increase cool and cold and have little effect on warm and hot. When energy is added to the planet that has an average temperature of around 58 F, the most impacted are cooler parts of the atmosphere — night temperatures, polar and high latitude cool and cold temperatures.
- The impact of warming reduces cold air masses more than warm. The warming also has an impact on the oceans, three quarters of the Earth’s surface. Talk about a sink for energy that goes to depths of miles — that’s a real modulator. Runaway warming is a scare-monger’s trope.
The 5% decrease in relative humidity that would occur if the planet temperature increased by 3 degrees F from its average of 58° F is so small as to be buried in randomness variabilities of temperatures of the planet, daily and seasonal. The relative humidity dramatically rises when temperature goes down. If you start at 50 degrees Fahrenheit and 50% relative humidity, at 40 degrees F, for example, the relative humidity would be 73% (2.3% rise per degree). At 90 degrees, it would be 13% (0.325% decline per degree).
The important thing to remember is that plants do not function well when it’s cold. Optimal plant temp is close to 90 when all things are considered, but remember: these junk scientists are not interested in science — they are propagandists for the green movement. Union of Concerned Scientists, indeed.
Although Mr. Ring didn’t discuss it, another consideration that blows a hole in the side of this enviro proposal is that an increase in planet temperature will cause an increased evaporative impact on open bodies of water — fresh and ocean water — so the premise that warming causes drier air that will suck water out of plants and make them more flammable tinder is not necessarily so. Warming may increase precipitation because as the warm air rises, water vapor condenses — clouds and rain.
Finally, the authors ignore the major reasons for an increase in wildfires: arson, more arson, and the tinderbox created by poor forestry practices, and restriction of logging and harvesting of forests that decreases density. Dense forests cause wildfires to be more frequent and of greater magnitude.
This paper is a part of a pattern — a poorly formulated claim of factoids is blown up into a basis for a scare. But a reasonable analysis of the science shows the claims to be inadequately formulated. Fossil fuel use and increased CO2 in the air are not the cause of any valid prediction of increased wildfire frequency or severity.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/lets_talk_climate_scares_and_wildfires_.html
France: Saint-François-Xavier church in Paris vandalised, five statues smashed
Five statues were smashed yesterday. The police were immediately called to the spot.
Annecy mayor described town as ‘refuge for those fleeing war’ days before Syrian migrant knife attack on toddlers
François Astorg, the mayor of the town that was the site of one of the most heinous crimes in Europe’s recent history on Thursday, waxed lyrical about the town’s dedication to inclusivity and diversity just days before a Syrian migrant embarked on a stabbing spree targeting toddlers.
“Annecy is a land of resistance to fascism, a land of solidarity, a city of refuge for those fleeing war, misery and misfortune in the world,” Astorg tweeted on May 23, describing it as his administration’s “duty” and “honor” to receive new arrivals to Europe.
Astorg had sent his tweet in condemnation of a nationalist march that had taken place in the town on the evening of May 16 as activists carried torches and French flags through the streets before stopping in front of the Notre Dame church.
“Last night our city council unanimously adopted a Republican wish condemning the demonstration that took place last Tuesday evening. Xenophobic, ultra-nationalist values will never have a place in our city,” Astorg said in response to the march.
Fast-forward a fortnight, and the Annecy mayor was leading the tributes to four young children — the eldest of whom was just three years old — and two adults who were stabbed by a 31-year-old Syrian refugee at a park in the town.
French media reported the attacker, known only as Abdalmasih H., is understood to have been living in Sweden since 2013 where he had been granted asylum and is married to a Swedish woman with whom he has a three-year-old daughter.
He had also claimed asylum in France and a number of other European countries, but his application was rejected a few days prior to the attack on the basis that he already had the rights he was applying for due to his refugee status in Sweden.
“His request in France was therefore pointless. He was legal from the point of view of EU law,” a source close to the investigation told the French newspaper Libération.
French authorities provided an update on the investigation on Friday, with the Annecy prosecutor’s office confirming the suspect’s custody has been extended. No further communication from the prosecutor is expected in the short term.
Meanwhile, French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne announced on Friday the condition of the victims was improving.
“I am closely monitoring the state of health of the victims. Their condition is stable. Fortunately, all the injured children were able to be operated on,” she told French media.
Three of the four children were hospitalized in Grenoble following the attack, while a fourth child was transferred to a hospital in Geneva.
Plantu’s cartoon about the Annecy tragedy causes polemic: the former cartoonist of Le Monde is accused of drifting into the far-right camp
@plantu
flirts with the extreme right
Long gone are the days when he was star cartoonist of
@lemondefr
France Mass Stabbing: Child Victims Remain in Critical Condition
Four young children stabbed during a frenzied attack by a Syrian asylum seeker in France remained in hospital intensive care Friday as investigators worked to unravel the motives of their assailant.
A three-year-old British child is among the injured, another is Dutch. Two adults were also hurt, with one in a critical condition.
As Breitbart London reported, the four child victims — aged between 22 months and three years old — were rushed to hospitals in the French city of Grenoble and Geneva in neighboring Switzerland.
A 31-year-old Syrian asylum seeker was arrested by French police immediately after the savage mass stabbing in Annecy, France.
AP reports French authorities said the suspect had recently been refused asylum in France, because Sweden had already granted him permanent residency and refugee status a decade ago.
Lead prosecutor Line Bonnet-Mathis said the man’s motives were unknown. He was armed with a folding knife, she said.
Videos posted to social media appeared to show a man with a beard, wearing a headscarf, dark sunglasses and shorts which revealed a leg tattoo running around in the park and chasing people with a knife in his hand.
A woman with a child in a stroller in the playground appeared to confront the suspect as he approached in one video seen by CBS News and she could be heard shouting at him in English, “No! Get away from the kids!”
Two adults also suffered knife wounds — life-threatening for one them, she said. One of the adults was hurt both by the attacker’s knife and later by a shot fired by police as they were making the arrest.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte were expected at the scene of the attack later on Friday to meet families and people who came to their aid.
Macron had condemned what he called an “absolutely cowardly attack” late Thursday night.
“Children and an adult are between life and death,” he said in a tweet. “The nation is in shock. Our thoughts are with them as well as with their families and the emergency services on the scene.”
India: Girls of Srinagar school protest against ‘Abaya ban’ inside school, principal says they can wear a long Hijab over the uniform
On Thursday, 8th June 2023, girl students of the Vishwa Bharti Girls Higher Secondary School in Rainawari of Srinagar in Jammu and Kashmir protested against the school administration alleging that the school instructed girls not to wear Abaya (long robe) in the classroom. However, the school’s principal has stated that the school is not banning Abaya, but only asking the girl students to wear uniforms with a matching Hijab.
The principal clarified that as the girls were wearing abays of different colours and designs, the school is asking them to wear hijabs instead that match the existing uniform. She also said that the girls can wear abaya but they have to wear the school uniform under it, and they will have to remove the abaya after reaching the school. Principal Memroz Shafi added that the girls have been asked to bring a long Hijab or Chadar, preferably white, to wear over the uniform while in school to cover their bodies as per Islamic rules.
In a clarification statement issued on 8th June 2023, the principal of the Vishwa Bharti Girls Higher Secondary School said, “That it has been running on social media that female students have been directed not to wear Abaya (long robe) which is totally baseless and misrepresented. The School Management always respects the sentiments of all the sections of the society vis a vis the dress code.”
The statement further said, “It is clarified that no ban has been imposed by the School Principal or the Management on wearing Abaya but it was politely conveyed to the students to wear the School Uniform underneath the Abaya. It is for the information of all the students that they can wear the Abaya and no such restrictions have been imposed in the classrooms.”
The principal further said in the statement, “Today’s conversation with the students and the parents has been misrepresented and in any case, if it has hurt the sentiments of the students or the parents, I unconditionally apologise for the same.”
A group of female students from Vishwa Bharti (VB) Girls Higher Secondary School in Rainawari recently organized a protest on Thursday, expressing their grievances over being denied entry to the school due to wearing the Hijab. According to the students, they were informed that if they wished to wear the Hijab, they should attend a “Madrasa” instead.
In response, the school administration clarified that they were not opposed to the Hijab, but rather expected students to adhere to the school’s dress code. The protesting students claimed that the school authorities had explicitly instructed them not to wear the Hijab and even requested them to refrain from wearing their abayas while coming to school. It is notable that the school has recently started coeducation.
According to reports, one of the protesting girls said, “Why should we take off the Abaya? I don’t love this school more than my God that I will take off this Abaya. I will never take my Abaya off, there are so many boys in the college and there is so much immorality going on which is invisible to their eyes and asking us to take off the Abaya.”
She added, “Who is she (administration official) to tell us to take the Abaya off? She asked us to go to a Dargah (Religious School) if we wish to wear an Abaya. Don’t the girls who wear Abayas get the same education as everyone else?”
Memroz Shafi, the principal of Vishwa Bharti (VB) School, clarified that wearing Abayas was permitted after the COVID-19 pandemic. She explained that for some time, only a few girls wore Abayas to school, but recently, girls from lower classes began wearing Abayas, disregarding the school’s uniform dress code. She that even though the school has its own dress code, some girls also wear ‘Abaya’, and they have never been stopped from doing that.
She said, “Nobody is asking them to remove abayas. They can leave home and reach the school wearing abaya without any restrictions, there should be no doubt about that. We told them to put aside that abaya when they reach the school. We have told them to bring along a long hijab that will cover them well up to their knees. They are also given an option of a Chador. Hijab is the most comfortable as compared to abayas and other things because we want all of them to wear a uniform. They come wearing abayas of different colors and designs which cannot be allowed in the school. I asked these girls to bring a white hijab that will cover them well up to their knees so that it looks uniform.”
“We will announce a proper colour and pattern of ‘Abaya’ for all those students who want come to school wearing the same. We are not allowing colourful Abayas to be followed in the institution” she further said.
According to the principal, the school instructed these girls to remove their Abayas for the day, as per the dress code. However, the girls expressed their discomfort with this. In response to the girls’ concerns, the school made arrangements to accommodate their preference for wearing the Hijab.
The Principal further mentioned that in consideration of the student’s wishes, the school did not accept admission requests from outsiders and instead directed them to schools that allowed the Hijab.
The hijab ban controversy was sparked in Karnataka in January 2022. The Karnataka High Court pronounced its decision that the school can impose uniforms on the educational premises.
Fearing ‘climate change,’ Ireland moves to kill the cows
By John Klar
Ireland has announced plans to cull hundreds of thousands of cows to comply with European Union climate policy. Similar initiatives in Belgium and the Netherlands ensure that beef prices will rise, but these proposals offer little environmental benefit. Indeed, cows are the heroes, not the villains, in rescuing the climate.
Ireland’s push to eliminate 200,000 cows demonstrates the persistent folly of climate alarmism, while contrasting the shortcomings of renewable energy products. The fundamental premise of the targeting of benevolent bovines is faulty: that cow burps cause damage to the environment. Interestingly, the alternatives propounded — for humans to obtain protein instead from insects, or soy-based synthetic meat substitutes — will profit industries who are key partners in the globalist effort to eradicate cows.
The attacks on cows are premised on data for beef and dairy cows managed in Concentrated Animal Feed Operations (CAFOs), in which the animals are fed a diet rich in grains. Manure is collected in lagoons or massive piles that must then be spread back onto the fields. It is the fossil fuels and chemicals involved in producing grains and other feed, and moving them (and the resultant manure) mechanically, that creates the lion’s share of cow pollution.
But cows raised on pasture, and rotated regularly, do not depend on GMO grains for their food, nor on diesel-powered equipment to discharge their fecal byproducts. More, their manure then replaces synthetic fertilizers, including urea manufactured from natural gas.
That fake meat that Bill Gates wants Americans to eat in place of cows is made from soy and other plant inputs. GMO soy and corn are produced using massive quantities of synthetic fertilizers, Round-Up and other herbicides, fossil fuels for tractors and harvesters, and more fuel to process and transport the food for human consumption. Also, in many areas, these crops are irrigated with precious underground aquifer resources. How is replacing grass-fed cows with fertilizer-fed and glyphosate-saturated soy an improvement to the environment?
Cows have been chewing cud to convert grass to steak for humans for thousands of years. In Ireland, the government has for years paid farmers to increase their herds and production, and many of those dairies are grass-fed. Ireland has built a niche market in that very field:
Until recently, the government had encouraged dairy farmers to expand to exploit the end of EU milk quotas. Farmers invested in new equipment and the dairy herd grew by almost half in the past decade. Irish butter, cheese and other produce — 90% is exported — filled supermarket shelves around the world.
In contrast, consider the production of solar panels in China, made from quartz heated with coal, spewing enormous amounts of pollution. Those will be funded, while cows are slaughtered as polluters? How much more toxic chemical pollution is released into the atmosphere when an electric car is manufactured than a cow ever belches? And how much water is saved, and soil rebuilt, in the United States when new windmills are shipped out versus properly stewarded cows?
The push to eliminate cows is a scam. One of the clearest proofs is that there is no attack on pigs or chickens. Ireland produces 70 million chickens a year; why aren’t they being culled? Chickens and pigs cannot be raised on grass, but are almost wholly dependent on grain crops. A genuine effort to curtail pollution from tilling and monoculture cropping would favor cows and sheep over pigs and chickens! (Ireland has 1.6 million pigs.) Instead, Ireland follows AOC and the WEF in the bullying of cattle.
Reducing dairy and beef production in Ireland will undermine its economy, as these make up about two thirds of the nation’s agriculture output, with 90% being exported. It will also drive up food prices and create environmental pressures in other nations that fill the production void. This is called “carbon leakage”: when production is moved to countries with an even higher carbon footprint.
Rewarding farmers for releasing confined animals back onto grass would sequester more carbon over time than E.V.s or solar panels, while improving soil health, reducing fertilizer use, and saving water (healthy soils retain more water). Also, when cows die, they rot back into the earth as healthy compost, unlike the inevitable future of solar panels and EVs, foisted on consumers by government edict in the name of climate rescue.
Eliminating cows increases food domination and profits for global corporations. It does not profit the environment much at all.