Tag: eu

Hormuz Blockade: Europe Mobilizing Against the U.S., Not the Iran Regime

When President Trump announced on Truth Social that the U.S. Navy would blockade “any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” he also instructed the Navy to interdict vessels that had paid tolls to Iran and to destroy mines Iran had placed in the waterway.

CENTCOM subsequently clarified the actual scope: the blockade applies to vessels entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas and does not affect ships transiting the strait to and from non-Iranian ports. The blockade is therefore a naval embargo on Iranian trade, not a closure of the strait to international shipping generally.

Trump took the action in response to Iran’s “world extortion.” The IRGC had imposed a de facto toll regime in the strait. The Tehran regime said that vessels would be required to submit documentation, obtain clearance codes, and accept IRGC-escorted passage through a single controlled corridor. Trump’s goal was to stop Iran from policing the strait and profiting from its closure while the rest of the world absorbed the economic damage.

Neither the U.S. nor Israel is dependent on oil transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Around the globe, the U.S. is the primary enforcer of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), maintaining freedom of navigation for all countries. Trump’s request for Europe and other allies to support U.S. freedom-of-navigation patrols in the Strait of Hormuz was rejected.

Europe’s argument was that the U.S. took action against Iran unilaterally and therefore could not expect European support. President Trump’s position is that the U.S. has spent trillions defending Europe and keeping sea lanes open around the globe for 70 years, and it was reasonable to ask for reciprocity.

Instead, Europe blames Trump for the Hormuz closure, completely ignoring the fact that it is the IRGC, not the U.S., that has closed the strait.

Their refusal to help reopen it is a classic example of cutting off your nose to spite your face, since Europe’s energy supplies are at stake, not America’s. However, anger at Trump is mobilizing Europe to form a coalition to protect the Strait from America rather than from Iran.

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With Hungary’s Orbán Gone, Europe May Escalate in Ukraine, Triggering a War Without U.S. Backing

Viktor Orbán’s concession on Sunday following Hungary’s parliamentary election removes the most consistent single-state obstacle to EU consensus on Ukraine, and in doing so raises the probability of European escalation in a conflict the continent lacks the military capacity to sustain without American backing.

Orbán conceded defeat after early results showed the opposition Tisza party on course for a two-thirds majority, with Tisza projected to win 135 of 199 seats and Fidesz taking 57. Voter turnout surpassed 77%, the highest since the fall of communism in 1989. Tisza’s leader, Péter Magyar, a former Fidesz insider who founded the party two years ago, will become prime minister.

joint EU summit communiqués on Ukraine carried an asterisk noting the position “was firmly supported by 26 heads of state or government” rather than all 27, because Orbán refused to sign any statement backing Kyiv. He vetoed a €90 billion EU loan to Ukraine, tying the bloc to a dispute over a damaged pipeline carrying Russian oil. He also blocked a 6.6 billion euro lethal aid package from the EU’s European Peace Facility, satellite image sharing with Ukraine, and EU accession talks for Kyiv.

Magyar stated Monday that Hungary would maintain its opt-out from participating in the €90 billion (approximately $100 billion) loan financially but would not veto it, allowing the EU to proceed. His personal reservations about weapons transfers and Ukraine’s EU accession bid are structurally irrelevant. Measures requiring unanimity were blocked by Orbán. Magyar will not block them. The brake is gone.

The significance of Orbán’s removal is that, without a veto blocking consensus, the EU is more likely to agree on additional weapons, money, and equipment transfers to Ukraine. That trajectory increases the probability of a Russian reaction. The question is whether European leaders have accurately calculated the risk.

European behavior suggests they have not. Countries that genuinely believe they must confront a nuclear-armed adversary, the world’s number-two military power, alone would be pushing for negotiations, not escalation.

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What a piece of 15,0000-year-old jewellery found in a Devon cave tells us about this prehistoric ‘civilization’

A piece of prehistoric jewellery, discovered in a West Country cave, is helping to shed new light on Stone Age Europe’s most spectacular culture.

Known as the Magdalenian, that 21,000 to 13,000 year old prehistoric ‘civilization’ dominated much of Western Europe, particularly southwest France, northern Spain and parts of Britain and Germany for most of the final 10,000 years of the Ice Age. A detailed scientific analysis of the British Magdalenian jewellery item, carried out at University College London and the Natural History Museum, has now revealed that it was a polished pendant made from a seal’s tooth.

It’s the first such artefact identified in Britain – and only the fourth anywhere in Europe.

The discovery adds to the substantial evidence showing that Stone Age Magdalenians were extremely fashion-conscious – and that they had a particularly strong preference for maritime-originating jewellery.

For, as well as the four seal-tooth pendants, many sites across Europe, often located far from the sea, have yielded literally thousands of marine shells, virtually all of which would have been used as personal adornments (as pendants, like the seal tooth – but also to beautify clothing and for use in necklaces, bracelets, anklets and headwear).

The scientific investigation into the British artifact (found in Kent’s Cavern, Torquay, Devon) has identified it as a premolar tooth of a grey seal, that had been polished and perforated by a Magdalenian artisan, using a handheld flint boring tool. Microscopic analysis of the wear pattern in the hole has revealed that the tooth had been worn as a pendant, suspended on some sort of cord. The wear, caused by the cord, was so substantial that the pendant appears to have been worn for many years or even decades.

Indeed, it’s conceivable that it may have been a valued heirloom, worn successively by several generations of the same family. Its value and significance to the Kent’s Cavern Magdalenian community – probably an extended family living there seasonally for many generations – is underlined by the fact that the seal tooth would have had to have initially been imported from the seashore which in Magdalenian times was between 50 and 100 miles away.

However, there would have been a direct river connection between the Kent’s Cavern area and the sea – along the river Teign’s prehistoric lower course (now submerged under the English Channel) and then along a now long-vanished major prehistoric waterway, dubbed the Channel River by archaeologists, to the Atlantic. In Magdalenian times, the Thames, the Rhine and the Seine were merely that Channel River’s major tributaries.

Even when living hundreds of miles from the sea, Magdalenian people had a strong cultural connection to it.

Via the Channel River and its many tributaries, they had an easy and direct connection to the Atlantic. They used large numbers of periwinkle, European cowrie and so-called ‘tusk’ shells as well as fossilised molluscs, sea urchin spines and sharks’ teeth to make jewellery and other adornments.

Like ordinary Atlantic seashells, these fossils must have been highly valued because they were often imported from hundreds of miles away. Shells were also imported to inland Magdalenian sites in France, Spain, Germany and Czechia from the Mediterranean. Some had travelled up to 600 miles.

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US & EU Negotiate Biometric Data-Sharing Deal

Washington wants to run European fingerprints through American databases, and the EU is considering it. The Department of Homeland Security and the European Union are in formal negotiations over an arrangement that would give DHS direct query access to biometric records held by EU member states, a level of access that Brussels has never granted to a non-EU country for border security purposes.

The deal sits inside DHS’s Enhanced Border Security Partnership program, which effectively tells Visa Waiver Program countries to open their biometric databases or risk losing visa-free travel privileges. Washington has set a December 31, 2026, deadline for EBSP agreements to be operational. After that, DHS reviews each country’s compliance. Countries that fail to meet expectations risk suspension from the VWP, which would reimpose visa requirements on their citizens.

When DHS encounters a traveler, asylum seeker, visa applicant, or anyone flagged during immigration processing, it would query a participating country’s database using that person’s biometrics.

A match returns fingerprints and related identity data to DHS.

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Battle for Hungary: How the Russiagate blueprint has been unleashed against Orban

The shadow campaign to swing the Hungarian election against Viktor Orban has escalated with the wiretapping of Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto. The case offers a rare look into how bureaucrats, journalists, and spies run a regime-change operation in real time.

Three weeks out from the April 12 elections, the political opposition to Orban scored what seemed to be a win over the weekend, when Politico and the Washington Post ran articles alleging that Szijjarto had phoned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with “live reports on what had been discussed” at multiple EU meetings. The reports cited anonymous “European security officials.”

Neither Orban nor Szijjarto make any secret of their desire to maintain cordial relations with Moscow, particularly on matters of energy security and the peace process in Ukraine. However, when bundled with more outlandish claims – that Russian “election fixers” are already embedded in Budapest, for example – the reports paint a picture of a government compromised by the Kremlin.

Orban’s leading opponent, Peter Magyar, has repeated these claims in his speeches. After the Szijjarto story broke, he accused the foreign minister of “betraying Hungarian and European interests,” and threatened him with “life imprisonment” for treason, should his Tisza party win the election.

All it took was one leaked audio file for the scheme to unravel.

The Szijjarto wiretapping plot

In an audio file released by Hungarian conservative outlet Mandiner on Monday, opposition journalist Szabolcs Panyi can be heard telling a source how he passed Szijjarto’s phone number to “a state organ of an EU country.” Once they had this number, he explained, agents of this country were able to extract “information about who that number spoke to, and they see who is calling that number or who that number is calling.”

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EU Parliament Told Continent Is ‘On Track For CIVIL WAR’

Europe’s ruling class has spent decades importing chaos under the banner of “diversity,” and now the bill is coming due in the most explosive way possible.

A major conference held inside the European Parliament has heard stark warnings that the continent is barreling toward civil war as mass migration erodes trust, creates no-go zones, and fractures societies along ethnic lines.

Professor David Betz of King’s College London cut straight to the point, telling the assembled lawmakers and experts: “Europe is on track for civil war”.

The event, titled Civil War: Europe at Risk?, was hosted by French populist-right leader Marion Maréchal and Sweden Democrats MEP Charlie Weimers. 

It also launched a new report documenting up to a thousand no-go zones across Europe based on public data including crime rates, sexual violence, youth gangs, unemployment, school performance, antisemitism, homophobia, mosque density, attacks on firefighters, and NGO presence.

Maréchal opened the conference by reflecting that formerly peaceful and stable societies are “rapidly transforming before our eyes into societies of violence and mistrust”, stating that “the main basis of trust between citizens is cultural homogeneity”, which is now fast eroding.

She warned Europe is already under a great strain of “diffuse guerrilla activity”, which takes various forms, including “riots, looting, random attacks, anti-white racism, and terrorist attacks”.

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The EU’s Failed Green Deal Is a Warning to Us All

Ambition cannot replace realism.

In 2020, the European Union launched its Green Deal. Six years later, investments in hydrogen-based projects have collapsed, and electricity prices are twice as high as in the US and China. Europe is losing its competitive edge. In our research for the Institute of Economic Affairs, we identify eight reasons why the EU Green Deal is not working. In doing so, we draw policy lessons for the United Kingdom.

In December 2019, the European Commission presented the Green Deal as a historic project. Europe would become the world’s first climate-neutral continent while strengthening its industrial base. Six years later, the picture is considerably bleaker. Electricity prices for industrial customers are about twice as high as in the US and China, several large-scale hydrogen projects have been postponed or cancelled, and the EU’s global competitiveness continues to weaken.

This development is not surprising. The green deal marks a clear break with traditional environmental policy, which has historically been based on emissions pricing, technology neutrality and incremental improvements. Instead, the EU has embraced a mission-oriented industrial policy in which the policy identifies winning technologies, sets detailed sectoral targets and channels large resources to selected projects and companies.

In a new collective volume—“The Green Entrepreneurial State? Exploring the Pitfalls of Green Deals”—we, together with 17 other researchers, analyse the green agenda from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. The conclusion is clear: green industrial policy suffers from structural problems; therefore, it rarely works as intended in practice.

First, the policy attempts to solve complex, systemic challenges with tools that require overview, control and predictability. But climate and energy systems are characterised by uncertainty, rapid technological development and global dependencies that cannot be controlled from above through roadmaps drawn by politicians. Germany’s Energiewende is a cautionary example: A politically motivated nuclear phase-out has contributed to high electricity prices, continued fossil fuel dependence and weakened industrial competitiveness.

Second, the green agenda ignores the fact that politicians and authorities are not neutral social planners but are influenced by self-interest, emotional narratives and special interests. The result is rent seeking, clientelism and support for projects that are politically attractive rather than socio-economically valuable. Europe’s investments in hydrogen, steel and battery production are stark illustrations of this problem.

Third, competition is distorted. When certain technologies—such as hydrogen, wind power or specific industrial projects—receive extensive support, the market’s decentralised selection process is undermined. Technologies that are not socio-economically viable are kept alive, while alternative solutions are squeezed out. This is exacerbated by the fact that system costs, grid expansion and storage requirements are often ignored in decisions.

Fourth, government risk-sharing increases moral hazard. When taxpayers bear a large part of the downside, the incentives to take excessive risks become stronger. Experience from several green mega-projects shows that technological optimism is often combined with a lack of cost control.

Finally, behavioural economic mechanisms play a central role. Climate policy has typically been couched in alarmist terms where threats are exaggerated and opportunity costs downplayed. In such a “loss framing,” even very risky and expensive projects become politically rational, despite the uncertainty of their benefits.

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Brussels Launches Brazen Election Interference in Hungary: Activating ‘Disinformation’ Censorship Machine to Silence Anti-Globalist Camp Ahead of April 12 Vote

A full-scale assault on Hungarian sovereignty is underway as unelected bureaucrats in Brussels crank up their censorship apparatus just weeks before Hungary’s crucial parliamentary election on April 12, 2026.

According to a report from Brussels Signal, European Commission has shamelessly activated the so-called “rapid response” mechanism under the oppressive Digital Services Act (DSA), a naked attempt to meddle in Hungary’s internal democratic affairs and tilt the playing field against the nationalist government of Viktor Orbán.

This heavy-handed measure will stay in place until a full week after Hungarians cast their ballots, supposedly to fight “disinformation” and foreign meddling. In reality, it’s a blatant power grab by Brussels elites who cannot stomach a sovereign nation refusing to bow to their federalist agenda.

Critics rightly call it outright election interference—giving faceless EU commissars the power to dictate what Hungarian citizens can read, share, and debate online in the heat of a national campaign.

Major platforms like Meta and TikTok are now forced to team up with so-called “fact-checkers” and “civil society” groups—many fattened by EU cash handouts—to hunt down and suppress content Brussels dislikes. This creates a corrupt echo chamber: Brussels funds the watchdogs, sets the rules, and then enforces them through Big Tech. No wonder impartiality has gone out the window.

The Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Brussels, via its Democracy Interference Observatory, has exposed this sham as anything but neutral. They warn it’s a politically motivated intervention designed to pre-emptively delegitimize the election if the Hungarian people dare to re-elect their patriotic leadership. The funding ties make it crystal clear: these are not independent guardians of truth, but paid extensions of the same Brussels machine targeting Hungary.

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EU Admits X’s Open Data Skews Disinformation Findings While Fining Platform for Restricting Researchers

The EU’s own diplomatic service has published a report admitting that X makes its data more accessible to researchers than other major platforms, and then used that admission to brand X the primary channel of “foreign information manipulation and interference” against the bloc.

The European External Action Service (EEAS) put this in writing. The media ran with the conclusion and buried the caveat.

The fourth annual FIMI Threats report, released this month, found that “88% of instances were concentrated on the platform X. The presence of CIB networks, the ease of creation of fabricated accounts, but also more straightforward access to data, explains this concentration.

Most of the major social media platforms restrict access to data that would allow for assessing the magnitude of information manipulation activities.”

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Orban Announces Will Block All EU Measures For Ukraine Until Oil Transit Restored

Hungary remains one of the lone Ukraine-skeptic EU/NATO members which actually has a lot of leverage, resulting in bolder and bolder pronouncements being issued by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of late.

He has newly made clear this week that Hungary will block all EU summit decisions in Ukraine’s favor until oil Russian flows resume. There’s ongoing controversy centered on the contested Druzhba pipeline and the central European nation’s vital flows from Russia.

“We would like to get the oil, which is ours, from the Ukrainians, which is now blocked by the Ukrainians, I did not support any kind of decision here, which is in favor of Ukraine … [as long as] the Hungarians are not able to get the oil which belong to us,” Orbán stated.

Obran has already blocked a proposed €90 billion ($103 billion) loan for Ukraine as well as efforts to slap new sanctions on Moscow, despite the pleadings, pressure, and interventions from other EU leaders.

“I will never support any kind of decision here which is in favor of Ukraine,” Orbán made clear at an EU meeting Thursday. “The Hungarian position is very simple. We are ready to support Ukraine when we get our oil, which is blocked by them,” Orbán underscored further.

Budapest has accused Ukraine of intentionally leaving the pipeline in a state of disrepair after Kiev alleged that Russia struck it. Ukraine has been charged with seeking to indirectly punish Hungary and squeeze its energy supplies.

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