Tag: eu

The Lockdown Disaster Must Not Be Forgiven: Massive European Study Vindicates Sweden’s Common-Sense Pandemic Response

We’re now rapidly approaching the six-year anniversary of “15 Days to Slow the Spread.”

That policy has to have been one of the most disastrous in world history, created by “experts” who took all established pre-pandemic planning documents and tossed them out the window at the first opportunity.

It was a policy based on inaccurate reports out of China, which claimed that their lockdowns effectively stamped out transmission of covid-19 within a matter of days.

It was a policy that ignored solid research – from established epidemiologists like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya – which found that the coronavirus had already spread much more widely than previously realised.

It must be noted forever that lockdowns and the associated mask mandates, vaccine passports and school closures continued in some places for several years. The ramifications of those wretched policies will be quite literally endless. It’s not an exaggeration to say that lockdowns, our policies and responses have quite literally changed the course of world history.

One would think that there would definitely be a concerted effort to understand whether such policies were effective or not. Whether approaching respiratory viruses with authoritarian crackdowns on businesses and schools was necessary to save lives.

Yet six years later, there’s unfortunately very little interest in examining those questions. And when you understand the data from Sweden, you will see exactly why.

Study on Swedish Approach to Covid Shows Lockdowns Didn’t Work

A study published in PubMed examined the Swedish approach to covid policy, relative to its European counterparts, primarily because Sweden did not rely on lockdowns in response to the pandemic, but instead used “voluntary and sustainable mitigation recommendations,” the study says.

Despite a “majority of Swedes” supporting those policies, “this approach faced rapid and continuous criticism.”

That criticism came primarily from public health figures such as, surprise, surprise, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who criticised Sweden repeatedly for going against the herd.

“You’ve compared us to Sweden, and there are a lot of differences,” he said during a Senate Committee hearing in September 2020. “But compare Sweden’s death rate to other comparable Scandinavian countries. It’s worse. So, I don’t think it’s appropriate to compare Sweden with us.”

“If you look at Sweden, they are in some trouble,” Fauci claimed on Good Morning America in late 2020. “They are starting to see that their death rate is much higher than the surrounding countries of Norway, Denmark, and Finland … They’re starting to see now that they’re having to rethink some of the things they did.”

This was, of course, not true. They did not “rethink” their strategy of light-touch recommendations over lockdowns. And comparing Sweden exclusively to its neighbours is an absurd misdirection that no other country was subjected to. But Fauci, obviously never one for honesty or intellectual integrity, represented many public health figures who were anxious to see Sweden fail.

Yet as this research shows, reality was precisely the opposite.

The study explains that Sweden received criticism for “not legally enforcing mask-wearing in public spaces,” as well as keeping schools open and “being too permissive” with its policies. All the things that we were told were necessary to stop covid and save lives. The researchers tested these statements using excess mortality data and stringency indices to compare Sweden across the whole of Europe, not just its neighbours.

They chose excess mortality because, unlike covid-specific measurements, it’s less subject to bias, differences in testing, and counting, and individual definitions of covid-caused outcomes. It also accounts for deaths that “could potentially be indirectly attributed to the negative effects of strict lockdown measures and the overall strain on healthcare systems, leading to reduced access to healthcare for other diseases, among other factors.”

Turns out that what they discovered was that Sweden vastly outperformed the rest of Europe from 2020-2022, with outcomes that were remarkably similar to the other Nordic countries.

“Among 42 European countries, the cumulative excess all-cause mortality from January 2020 to December 2022 ranged from 46 (Luxembourg) to 1,080 (Bulgaria) deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, with a median of 351/100,000,” they write. “In Sweden, the excess mortality rate of 158/100,000 was among the lowest, ranked 37th among 42 countries, and not very different from other Nordic countries: Norway (129), Denmark (97), and Finland (228).”Björkman A, Gisslén M, Gullberg M, Ludvigsson J. The Swedish COVID-19 approach: a scientific dialogue on mitigation policies. Front Public Health. 2023 Jul 20;11:1206732. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1206732. PMID: 37546333; PMCID: PMC10399217.

So why did Sweden underperform in 2020 relative to its neighbours? Likely due, as the study explains, to “mortality displacement due to low all-cause mortality in 2019,” as well as “poorly organised older adult care structures.”

What does this mean? Essentially, there were significantly fewer deaths from all causes in Sweden in 2019, meaning there were more extremely elderly people alive in 2020 who were susceptible to severe outcomes from covid. This is reflected in the massive age gradient with covid-associated deaths. In Sweden, “~40% of the covid-19-associated deaths were among patients in nursing homes,” the study says, “and 67% of all covid-19 deaths were among individuals above 80 years of age, representing 10% of all deaths in that age group.”

For younger age groups, covid was mostly a non-issue. “covid-19 deaths below 50 years of age represented only 1.2% of all covid deaths, including 21 individuals below 20 years of age, mostly with underlying co-morbidities, representing 1% of all deaths in that age group.”

Effectively, covid ravaged extremely elderly people, while those under 50, despite the lack of mask mandates and lockdowns, saw very limited impact.

Keep reading

Zelensky’s Honoring of Nazi Collaborators and War Criminals Gets Reprimanded by European Parliament – 60% of Polish Citizens Now AGAINST Ukraine’s Ascension to the EU

Zelensky’s seemingly infinite arrogance is hurting him.

While Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky was again fêted by Euro-Globalists in another one of those summits that yield a lot of MSM airtime but few results, there’s an undercurrent that is very worrying to the Kyiv regime.

The Globalists’ ‘favorite child,’ Zelensky, has had to defend himself against the accusation of not acting ‘in accordance with European values.’

The reason, as we have reported, is the Kiev regime’s insistence in honoring Nazi collaborators and War Criminals.

With these unacceptable choices, Zelensky enraged all of Poland, and not even Liberal-Globalist Donald Tusk can defend him at the moment.

Add to that the fact that Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister, Andrej Babiš, his counterpart of the Czech Republic, and Peter Magyar, Hungary’s premier, are all against funding the Ukrainian war effort.

Die Welt reported (translated from the German):

“The extent to which Ukraine and Poland are intertwined is proven by a current historical-political conflict. President Zelensky recently showed remarkable blindness when he awarded the honorary title of ‘Heroes of the UPA’ to a deserving unit of the Ukrainian army. The UPA was the ‘Ukrainian Insurgent Army’ that had been fighting against the Soviet Union for Ukraine’s independence since the 1920s.

[…] In 1943, UPA fighters murdered about 100,000 Poles in western Ukraine – in Volhynia, eastern Galicia, the Lublin region and in the Subcarpathian Mountains; they also committed massacres against Jews. In the memory of the Poles, who for centuries had little good to expect from their neighbors, this tragedy left deep marks.”

Keep reading

Brussels Has Opinions About Your Social Media Feed

The European Commission wants the power to force a redesign of the apps on your phone. Regulators in Brussels said Friday that Instagram and Facebook break European law because the products are built to hold your attention. They are ready to fine Meta as much as 6 percent of its global revenue, more than $12 billion, until the company rebuilds the apps to Brussels’ liking.

The preliminary findings target the ordinary machinery of a modern feed, from infinite scroll and autoplay to push notifications and the recommendation systems that decide what you see next. The Commission’s proposed remedy seems like a product spec written by a government. It wants autoplay and infinite scroll switched off by default, real screen time breaks built in, and the algorithm retuned so it stops working so hard to keep you around.

The finding falls under the Digital Services Act, the law Brussels uses to police what Europeans can post and see online.

The machinery now aimed at button placement and video autoplay is the same machinery built to decide which content stays up and which comes down. Once a regulator can order how an app is designed, the distance between design and speech runs short.

Someone has to define “addictive,” and under this law that someone is the government. The Commission says Meta pushes users into “autopilot mode” and failed to weigh the risks its design poses to minors and what it calls vulnerable adults.

The behavior it describes, opening an app and scrolling longer than you meant to, is familiar to anyone with a phone. The question is who gets to name it a harm and prescribe the cure.

“Protecting the physical and mental health of Europeans must be a priority for social media platforms. The Digital Services Act provides a clear framework to hold platforms accountable for the addictive design and effects of their services. We are fully committed to enforcing our legislation in Europe,” said Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy.

The title alone shows how wide the mandate has grown. One official holds a brief that spans “tech sovereignty, security and democracy,” and from that chair rules that a scrolling feed threatens public health.

Meta rejects the finding. “We disagree with these preliminary findings, which don’t accurately take into account the significant steps we’ve taken to protect teens.

Keep reading

EU Brings Back Chat Surveillance, Even As More MEPs Vote No

Europe’s biggest platforms can once again scan your messages without a warrant or any reason to suspect you of anything. The European Parliament revived a mass-surveillance regime on Thursday that its own members had already voted down in March, and it passed even with fewer MEPs backing it than opposing it.

The count on the measure known as Chat Control 1.0 came in at 314 against, 276 in favor, and 17 abstentions. More members voted to kill the regulation than to keep it, and it became law regardless, a version of democracy that would surprise most of the people living under it.

Because the European People’s Party forced the proposal back as a second reading, blocking it no longer took a simple majority of the room but an absolute majority of the entire Parliament, 361 of all 720 seats, counted whether a member turned up or not.

That threshold made absence decisive. The vote landed on the final sitting day before summer recess, a date when much of Parliament has historically already left Strasbourg for home, and under an absolute-majority rule every empty seat weighs against the side trying to reach 361. The 314 who showed up to reject the regulation were not outvoted by a larger camp in favor, since only 276 wanted it. They fell 47 votes short of a bar set by the size of the whole chamber rather than the size of the vote.

The contrast with the spring tells the rest of the story. When Parliament last ruled on this in March, defeating the extension needed only a simple majority, and 311 against, 228 in favor, with 92 abstentions, was enough to sink it and let the regime lapse in April. This week a slightly larger bloc, 314, voted the same way and lost. The will of Parliament did not shift between March and July. The procedure and the calendar did and that was enough to overturn the result.

Arithmetic handed the tech industry the outcome it wanted. Warrantless scanning of private communications is legal again across the bloc until 2028. Parliament did attach an exemption for encrypted communications, a gesture that costs nothing given that providers were not scanning encrypted chats anyway. A more substantive attempt failed. A move to restrict scanning to people a court had already flagged as suspects drew even stronger support, 322 to 255, and still collapsed against the same 361-vote wall. What survived was the broadest, most industry-friendly version on offer, one that monitors everyone’s messages by default and asks judicial permission for none of it.

Dr. Patrick Breyer, civil rights activist and former Member of the European Parliament, sent a statement to Reclaim The Net. “The fact that Chat Control is moving forward against the will of the majority of voting MEPs is a farce and damages democracy. Our children are the real losers in this undemocratic process. The passage of a genuine, permanent child protection regulation is now in serious jeopardy. The Council will never agree to a desperately needed paradigm shift as long as they can simply stick to the old approach of suspicionless scanning at the whim of the tech industry.”

He framed the loss as temporary. “Today’s vote on the interim regulation was a setback, but the political battle over the permanent ‘Chat Control 2.0’ is just getting started. The resistance we saw in Parliament today was so strong that finding a majority for permanent, suspicionless mass scanning in future negotiations is a complete pipe dream.”

His objection actually runs deeper than mere procedure. “Trying to protect children with suspicionless mass surveillance is like frantically mopping the floor while the faucet is still running. Blanket chat control is just as unacceptable as indiscriminately opening everyone’s physical mail. For five years, this failed system has served as a smokescreen to delay real action, all while overwhelming the police with false alarms. We need more child protection, not less—but we need effective protection, not the illusion of security.”

The reinstated regime holds until 2028 or until governments and Parliament agree on a permanent replacement, with negotiations set to resume in September. The dispute there turns on a single question that has divided Parliament, the member states, and the Commission for years, which is whether the scanning of private chats should cover everyone or reach only criminal suspects.

Keep reading

Surveillance Disguised as Safety: Cars Sold in EU To Spy on Drivers 24/7

As of Tuesday, July 7th, all new cars sold within the European Union are required by law to include an extra spy gadget, whether you want it or not. 

The so-called driver monitoring camera, switched on at all times while the car is running above 20 km/h, and capable of precisely tracking the driver’s eye movements, is part of the now mandatory Advanced Driver Distraction Warning system, or ADDW. 

Its purpose is to detect if the driver falls asleep or gets distracted, and if they look away from the road for a certain amount of time, depending on the speed, the car warns them with a combination of sound, light, or vibration. 

The tech must also be so advanced as to know exactly if the driver is looking at the speedometer or the display screen, for instance, each with its own allowed number of seconds before the system activates. Looking at a phone or turning back to the kids, however, earns an instant warning.

BREAKING:

The EU today introduced the new requirement for all new cars registered in Europe to have installed cameras filming the driver’s face.

The system is called Advanced Driver Distraction Warning, ADDW, and is part of the EU’s General Safety Regulation.

The camera tracks… pic.twitter.com/oqnWXuz0ir— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) July 7, 2026

The idea may be a noble one, as the EU estimated that the new measure will save 25,000 lives by 2038. However, it’s also problematic on multiple fronts. 

Not only is it the latest annoying piece of EU overregulation—tests indicate that the system activates way too often, confuses blinking with drowsiness, and tends to tell drivers to take a break even if they’ve been driving for ten minutes—but the regulation leaves room for plenty of privacy concerns.

On paper, the ADDW should work on a “closed loop” system, meaning all data is processed locally, within the car, and no footage should be uploaded to any third-party server, be it the car manufacturer’s or law enforcement’s. 

However, data privacy experts warned that the implementation might not be so straightforward. 

For one, the EU regulation does not impose any independent audit to ensure that the ADDW systems installed actually operate on a closed-loop basis. Meaning both the car manufacturers and the tech companies selling them these systems could theoretically circumvent the rules and stealthily collect data on drivers.

Secondly, the EU offers little clarity over how the data is handled. We don’t know how much footage the system captures once a “distraction” decision has been made, nor how long that data is stored or when it gets deleted, if it ever does. 

The implications are obvious. The continuous surveillance of the inside of a car can net car companies (or any third party that’s capable of hacking into it) a treasure trove of data that’s too valuable to pass on. Put simply, driver behavior can be turned into precious consumer data to be used internally or sold to the highest bidder.

And this is not just a hypothetical, but something that already happened. In 2024, GM, Honda, Acura, Kia, Hyundai, and Mitsubishi were all caught sharing driver behavior data—including mileage, speed, hard braking, and rapid acceleration—with multiple data brokers. These turned the data into “risk scores” and sold them to insurance companies, which then freely used them to increase their personalized rates by over 20%.

Another investigation in 2023 revealed that Tesla employees had been secretly pulling and sharing video footage made by the forward-facing cameras of their cars, including clips of crashes, road-rage incidents, and even of people getting undressed near their vehicles. 

Now imagine what could go wrong when suddenly millions of European cars all have cameras facing inside. Even if GDPR should protect consumers on paper, it’s only a matter of time until someone gains access to all the sensitive data and footage these cameras capture along the way.

Keep reading

Madrid Requests European Army

Spain’s latest position perfectly illustrates what has become one of the great contradictions within NATO. Madrid wants Europe to build its own military capable of acting independently of Washington, yet Spain has consistently resisted NATO’s higher defense spending targets while expecting the alliance to continue providing collective security.

Spain is again championing the idea of a European army while insisting it can meet its NATO obligations without matching the spending commitments accepted by virtually every other member. Europe cannot demand strategic independence while simultaneously asking someone else to pay the bill.

I have said for years that Europe has always dreamed of becoming an independent military power. Long before the war in Ukraine, Brussels was discussing a unified European army, common procurement, centralized command, and eventually a foreign policy independent of Washington. Every crisis has been used to advance that objective. The migration crisis expanded Brussels’ authority. COVID centralized health policy. The Ukraine war accelerated fiscal integration through joint borrowing and massive defense spending. Now the argument is that Europe needs its own army because it can no longer rely entirely on the United States. That has been the destination all along.

Ironically, Spain is making the argument while remaining one of NATO’s weakest contributors. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez rejected the alliance’s new goal of spending 5% of GDP on defense by 2035, insisting Spain can fulfill its obligations while spending only about 2.1% of GDP. That position has frustrated allies who argue collective defense cannot function if some members continually expect others to shoulder the burden. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has repeatedly argued that Europe’s security environment now requires substantially greater investment across the alliance.

Europe must ultimately decide what it wants. If it genuinely intends to build an independent military capable of defending the continent without American leadership, then it must also accept the enormous financial burden that comes with that decision. A modern European army would require hundreds of billions of euros in new spending, integrated command structures, common procurement, expanded ammunition production, satellite capabilities, cyber warfare, missile defense, logistics, and nuclear deterrence. None of that comes cheaply.

The greatest long-term strategic challenge is no longer Europe. It is the Indo-Pacific. China is rapidly expanding its navy, modernizing its nuclear arsenal, increasing pressure on Taiwan, and competing directly with the United States across technology, manufacturing, shipping, and finance. America cannot simultaneously concentrate the majority of its military resources in Europe while preparing for a potential confrontation in Asia.

If Europe believes Russia represents its primary existential threat, then Europe should take primary responsibility for confronting Russia. That is neither anti-European nor isolationist. It is simply strategic reality. The United States should remain an ally, but not Europe’s permanent security guarantor. Washington has carried that burden since the end of the Second World War. Meanwhile, European governments repeatedly criticize American foreign policy while relying upon American aircraft carriers, intelligence, logistics, nuclear deterrence, and taxpayers whenever a genuine crisis emerges.

The post-1945 order is fragmenting. Nations are increasingly pursuing regional spheres of influence rather than a single American-led global system. Europe seeks strategic autonomy. China seeks dominance in Asia. Russia seeks influence over its near abroad. The United States must decide where its vital interests truly lie. If Europe wants its own army, then let Europe build it. America’s focus should increasingly shift toward maintaining stability in the Pacific, where the balance of power over the next several decades is far more likely to determine the future of the global economy than another generation of underwriting European defense.

Keep reading

EU Reddit Users Must Verify Age With Government ID or Selfie

Reddit began forcing many of its European users to prove their age on June 24, and it chose an invasive way to do it. Anyone the platform’s automated systems flag as possibly under 18 now has to hand over a government ID or a live face scan to a third party before opening a single mature community. The rollout covers the European Union and Norway, and Reddit frames the whole thing as compliance with censorship and digital ID EU law.

If you refuse the check and you keep your account, though, the mature side of Reddit vanishes from view. Agree to it, and you feed your identity into Persona, the outside verification firm Reddit leans on to decide whether you are old enough to read what you came to read.

The screening starts before anyone asks for a document. Reddit runs software that monitors your every move and estimates your age from how you behave on the site, reading your posting history, and the words you use.

If you look like an adult to the machine, nothing changes. If you look like a teenager, the mature communities lock until you verify. The company has not published the full list of signals it weighs, which leaves users to reverse-engineer a system that has already decided something about them.

The net catches far more than adult content. Users posting screenshots of the verification flow reported that some mental health support communities are tagged NSFW, which drags them behind the same wall. Someone reaching out during a crisis can find themselves asked to show a passport first. Reddit built its name on letting people speak without one attached, and that is the exact thing the check strips away.

Teenagers face a separate set of rules. Accounts held by 13 to 15-year-olds are locked to the most restrictive privacy settings with no way to loosen them, covering chat, followers, and whether the profile surfaces in search. Yet, keep in mind, everyone’s privacy has already had to be invaded to get to this point.

Users who are 16 or 17 start with the same defaults but can change them. Reddit presents this as protection, and some of it does protect, though it arrives welded to the identity demand rather than offered instead of it.

The expansion follows months of regulatory pressure, most of it out of the United Kingdom. British regulators fined Reddit £14.47 million, roughly $19 million, earlier this year after finding the company had unlawfully handled children’s personal information between May 2018 and July 2025.

Reddit had let people self-declare their age at signup, a method the Information Commissioner’s Office said children could get around without effort. “It’s concerning that a company the size of Reddit failed in its legal duty to protect the personal information of UK children,” Information Commissioner John Edwards said.

Keep reading

New EU proposal aims to stop drivers from speeding using satellites

According to the proposal, every new car would be equipped with a device that can limit the engine’s power for drivers who are speeding. This would be done remotely, based on their speed and location.

The system would use a combination of GPS technology, satellite data, and cameras to identify speed limits and monitor vehicle speed.

How would this work? First, satellites pinpoint the car’s location and determine its speed. Next, the car’s onboard cameras spot traffic signs that indicate the maximum speed. If a driver is speeding, the car’s built-in computer forces it to slow down to the maximum speed limit.

Safety campaigners believe the technology will significantly reduce casualties by 20%.

If approved, the system could be mandatory for all new vehicles in the EU by 2030.

The United Kingdom would be exempted because of Brexit. However, experts expect that car manufacturers will introduce the proposed technology in the UK as well, as it would be too expensive to build cars just for the UK market.

Shadow Transport Secretary Richard Holden has raised concerns about the technology’s reliability, fears of hacking, and doubts about drivers’ privacy.

Keep reading

European Taxpayers Spend 3.9B Euros on Drones for Ukraine

The European Union just sent another €3.9 billion to Ukraine to buy drones. This is not humanitarian aid. This is war financing. Reuters reported that the latest transfer is part of the EU’s new €90 billion loan program designed to keep Kyiv funded through 2026 and 2027. The money is being directed toward Ukraine’s drone procurement, meaning European taxpayers are now openly financing the weapons system that has become central to this war.

Do not let anyone pretend Europe is a neutral party. The EU Council itself says support for Ukraine has reached €211.3 billion since the war began. That figure includes military, financial, humanitarian, and refugee-related support. Now Brussels is adding a €90 billion loan on top of that to cover Ukraine’s budget and defense needs for the next two years. This is not charity. This is Europe admitting it intends to keep the war going because Ukraine cannot finance it on its own.

The EU sent nearly €2.8 billion earlier in June, Reuters reported another €3.2 billion tranche under the broader loan structure, and now another €3.9 billion is being pushed out for drones. Ukraine’s reconstruction costs are estimated at $588 billion over the next decade, while Kyiv is signing more than 160 recovery agreements worth over €10 billion. Europe is no longer merely supporting Ukraine. It is building the financial architecture for a permanent war economy.

Keep reading

Europe’s Highest Court Rules Against Military Member in COVID Vaccine Mandate Case

A military officer failed to convince Europe’s highest court that Italy’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for military members discriminated against military members because the mandate didn’t also apply to civilian employees.

The officer, identified by the initials B.G., served in Italy’s Army Engineer Corps. He was suspended without pay in January 2022 for refusing to comply with the mandate.

Earlier this month, the European Court of Justice ruled that opposition to vaccine mandates based on policy disagreement, rather than sincerely held belief, is not protected under European Union (EU) anti-discrimination law.

B.G. challenged his suspension, arguing that regular COVID-19 tests were an acceptable alternative to compulsory vaccination and that workers in other sectors were given this choice.

Italy’s Constitutional Court ruled against him, finding that the military vaccine mandate was an appropriate measure for military personnel.

On appeal, Italy’s Council of State, the country’s highest administrative appeals court, asked the European Court of Justice to clarify several legal questions.

The European Court of Justice found that B.G. did not demonstrate a sincerely held religious, spiritual or philosophical belief protected under EU law.

“Judges found BG was not expressing a protected religious, philosophical or spiritual belief but challenging Italy’s public health policy,” Courthouse News reported. His objections “focused on vaccine effectiveness, possible side effects, testing as an alternative and the way the mandate was implemented.”

In its ruling, the European Court of Justice wrote that B.G. “does not seek to oppose the compulsory vaccination at issue in the main proceedings on the basis of his own beliefs, but to challenge, as such, the choices made by the Italian authorities in the field of public health.”

Those objections “constitute opinions” on public health, and as such, are not protected. Aside from sincerely held beliefs, EU law also protects against discrimination based on age, disability or sexual orientation.

Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst called the ruling “unfortunate and disappointing,” as the legal protection of personal beliefs in the EU “appears to be an empty shell.”

Keep reading