Tag: eu

EU Cohesion Breaks: Madrid Socialists Impose Border Protections Against Italians After Third World Invasion

Spain is to impose new border controls for flights and ships from Italy as the two countries’ row over the influx of migrants into Ceuta intensifies.

Sky News reports that the Spanish government has confirmed that passport, nationality and visa checks would be conducted for Italian passengers and visitors from other countries arriving from Italy from midnight ​on Saturday ‌until 7 September.

The Spanish government called Italy’s decision to suspend Schengen travel agreements (following the Spanish enclave’s un-fettered invasion by over 70,000 military-aged male Moroccans), “unjust, contrary ‌to EU interests and discriminatory” and with a full straight face the socialist leadership added that the decision has been taken “amid the persistent irregular migratory pressure” from Italy.

The unhinged socialists in Madrid are losing their minds over the Italian government’s move to suspend the Schengen travel agreement because it wanted to protect its national sovereignty after the Spanish African enclave of Ceuta was invaded by 70,000 mostly military-aged men.

The migrant invasion, which Elon Musk described as comparable to scenes from “World War Z,” was a complete optics disaster for the socialists in Madrid, and really, for socialists and the far left across the West, who have been hellbent on importing the Third World to install new voting blocs and build political power. Now, that move, via uncontrolled mass migration, has been delegitimized, and countries like Italy have had enough.

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Global Diesel Crunch Deepens As Record US Distillate Exports Race To Supply-Starved Europe

US distillate exports surged to a record last week as global supplies tightened. Disruptions across the Gulf area and various surrounding maritime chokepoints, as well as Ukrainian one-way attack drone strikes that have paralyzed portions of Russia’s energy infrastructure, have been a major boon for US refiners and export terminals along the Gulf of America.

To begin the week, Samantha Dart, co-head of global commodities research at Goldman Sachs, told Bloomberg TV, “The situation in Russia is really one thing that worries us a lot.”

Dart warned, “I’d say on the oil side, as I mentioned before, diesel, I think is the oil product that is most vulnerable right now, not just because you have your seasonal demand strength ahead just in the winter, but on the supply side. And to your point in the beginning, it’s not just that you run war, it’s what’s happening to the Russian refineries as well. And Russia is usually a pretty big exporter of diesel. And now they have restricted it.”

Last month, Goldman analyst Daan Struyven warned that “Diesel is at the epicenter of the supply squeeze.” 

As global supplies dwindle, US energy exporters on the Gulf of America emerged as the winners, shipping a record 1.9 million barrels to overseas customers last week.

Shipments have exceeded 1.5 million barrels a day for five consecutive weeks, with recent cargoes heading to northwestern European ports – the epicenter of a global diesel shortage caused by Gulf area refinery disruptions through Hormuz and Ukrainian attacks on Russian refining capacity.

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Spanish Socialist Leader Sánchez Accuses Fellow EU Leaders of Being ‘Selfish’ over Response to Ceuta Migrant Crisis

Socialist Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has accused fellow European Union leaders of being “selfish” for expressing concerns and enacting border restrictions in the wake of tens of thousands of illegal migrants flooding into Ceuta this week.

The North African city of Ceuta, which stands as a territorial exclave of Spain bordering Morocco, was overrun this week by a flood of aliens seeking to reach European Union territory. Estimates put the number of illegal entries at upwards of 60,000, overwhelming the border protections and nearly equalling the entire population of the city within just days.

The dramatic scenes of tens of thousands of African migrants breaching the gates of EU territory recalled memories of the Europe Migrant Crisis of 2015 and immediately sparked a wave of condemnations of the Socialist government in Madrid from fellow EU leaders, who demanded that Spain protect their common border. Some went even further, with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni enacting emergency border controls with Spain, suspending the free movement under the Schengen agreement.

On Saturday, a group of 22 European leaders issued a letter calling for an emergency meeting on the issue of Ceuta. The leaders warned of the potential “repercussions of uncontrolled crossings of the border” at the Spanish exclave, which the letter argued, “may encourage other attempts of this kind.”

“We cannot allow massive and uncontrolled crossings, the instrumentalisation of migration, or other hybrid threats that create the perception that it is possible to enter the European Union illegally and that an illegal entry can later become a legal stay,” the letter stated.

In a letter of his own, addressed to EU Commission Chief Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa, Prime Minister Sánchez claims that within two days, his government has “fully restored control of the border” and has returned “almost all” illegal immigrants who crossed in recent days, while accusing his critics of being “selfish”.

The Spanish PM said per El Mundo that the decision to impose border restrictions was motivated by “prejudices, fake news, ignorance, or political interests,” and goes against “European Law, humanitarian Law, and the principles of solidarity” among member states.

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The Latest Wildfire Panic is Refuted by Data

Wildfires are in the news. With a hot, dry summer it was bound to happen. And, naturally, this is bringing with it talk of climate change.

The Independent is screaming and rending its garments:

Europe is on fire – will the continent’s climate change deniers finally wake up?

The Guardian has an opinion piece calling for prosecutions for climate crimes. Twitter experts are calling for changes to the way we live our lives.

Prince William is saying stuff:

Wildfires ‘stark reminder’ of extreme climate challenge, says William

I suppose we should make the usual point, that wildfires are a natural phenomenon that are an important part of the life cycle of many ecosystems. And that some years are bound to be worse than others.

But there’s just one issue, wildfire activity is actually down.

A new study from the University of East Anglia, published in May, found that 2025 was 16% below the average in terms of burnt area, and that’s despite policies known to increase both the chance of wildfires starting and the area they will burn.

But that was last year, this year must be different given the coverage, right?

Wrong.

Data from the EU’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service shows that, to the end of June, this year had substantially lower wildfire activity – across every continent – than any year since they began collecting data in 2003.

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EU’s Green Deal is pushing Europe into decline

An Energy Institute report reveals a Europe clinging to the pretence of leading an “energy transition” as the continent declines under the weight of climate policies whose quixotically utopian objectives are negated elsewhere by fossil fuel-supported economic growth.

Data from the 75th edition of the annual ‘Statistical Review of World Energy‘ will surprise only those ignoring the facts: The world continues to depend massively on fossil fuels [more correctly, hydrocarbon fuels]. Solar and wind technologies, while expanding, still lag ever-rising energy demand, which last year reached a record 600 exajoules. (That’s 600 quintillion joules, where a joule is equal to the work necessary to create one watt of power for one second.)

Of total primary energy consumption, 86% came from fossil fuels – oil at 33.5%; coal, 27.6%; and natural gas, 25.1%. Accounting for just 3% were solar and wind, which are heavily promoted by the European Commission over the much-demonised hydrocarbons.

From 2015-2025, the first decade of the Paris Agreement on climate change, global energy consumption rose more than 14%, with sharply contrasting dynamics. European Union use declined about 1% annually, while consumption in the Asia-Pacific region grew 2.6%.

Europe’s decreasing energy use is no triumph of ecological heroics but rather an outcome of the assault of the EU Green Deal on competitiveness and its predictable deindustrialisation and economic decline. For example, in 2025, growth in gross domestic product for some European countries was close to zero, while the US was 2% under the hydrocarbon-friendly Trump administration. Some coal-burning Asians experienced multiples of that.

Noting this EU tragedy, the European Central Bank’s 2024  report on competitiveness blamed not climate policies directly but instead high energy prices the policies had wrought – a sleight of hand accommodating EU politics.

Meanwhile, the growth of fossil fuels outside the EU continued to outstrip significantly that of solar and wind. Contrary to the Brussels narrative that the gap between so-called renewable technologies and fossil fuels is narrowing, the reality, in absolute terms, is a widening chasm. The EU has indeed integrated renewables into its grid, doing so at the cost of affordability and reliability. However, this leadership remains purely symbolic because the rest of the world is accelerating its use of fossil fuels far faster than that of renewables.

In places like Asia, the expansion of hydrocarbon use concurrently with impressive economic growth was more than coincidental. It was necessary, and China and India led the way.

Early this century, the impetus for Chinese growth was the lesson of the Soviet Union’s collapse, a result of deplorable living standards and a dim outlook for the future. The Chinese Communist Party recognised that growth was needed to maintain its legitimacy and that abundant, cheap energy – mainly coal – would be the critical ingredient.

This prosperity is good news to everybody but those obsessed with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the bogeyman of the climate industrial complex. In its drive to cut emissions by 90% by 2040, the EU has reduced emissions by 554 million metric tonnes under the Paris Agreement as the rest of the world increased its own by 3 billion metric tonnes – fivefold in the opposite direction. The European effort is incinerated almost instantly by the combustion of fossil fuels elsewhere to support increased economic activity.

Most damning for 30 years of climate diplomacy is that global industrial emissions have risen by 67% since the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (“UNFCCC”) in 1992, according to the 2026 ‘Statistical Review of World Energy’. While the EU cut its emissions in that time by about 30%, the effort, achieved at enormous cost and deindustrialisation, has been erased by others’ pursuit of human flourishing.

Compared with previous editions, the language of the latest Energy Institute analysis is markedly more favourable to renewables. One explanation may be the publisher’s collaboration with Ember, a self-identified “energy think tank that aims to accelerate the clean energy transition with data and policy.” The Energy Institute itself seeks “to accelerate a just, secure, and low-carbon energy transition.”

Obviously, our scepticism about the EU’s green agenda is based on the data presented in the report, not on the publishers’ interpretation of it. We sought to contrast the pathetic product of EU energy policy with the promising economic rise of others.

Despite the omnipresent rhetoric of the energy transition, the evidence must be faced: The dominance of fossil fuels in the world energy system persists even as wind and solar, expensive and intermittent, expand. The world is undergoing an energy addition, not a transition, as new technologies supplement the growing capacity of legacy sources.

The great majority of mankind aspires to more prosperity, which requires abundant and cheap energy – what the EU employed before adopting ecological dogma. The clash between climate ambitions and economic aspirations will only intensify.

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“USA Isn’t A PiggyBank For Europe”: Trump Launches Section 301 Probe Into EU Over Big Tech Fines

Trump Says US Begins Section 301 Investigation on Europe 

President Trump wrote on Truth Social that the US will launch a Section 301 investigation into the European Union for “robbing American companies, in turn, the American Taxpayer.” 

Trump said Brussels is using America as a “PIGGYBANK” by fining Big Tech companies billions and billions of dollars.

Trump listed the technology companies that have been fined a combined billions of dollars:

After having fined Apple, for no reason at all, 15 Billion Dollars, Meta, 3 Billion Dollars, Amazon 2.5 Billion Dollars, and many others, we have just been informed that Google, a truly advanced and amazing group, has been fined yet another 1 Billion Dollars, without explanation. This brings the Google total to over 18 Billion Dollars!

Trump continued:

This illegal and highly discriminatory practice started at these high levels during the first year of the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, but it’s not going to continue during the Trump Administration.

He added:

The United States of America is not a “PIGGYBANK” for Europe, nor will we allow it to be!

Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that we will immediately initiate a 301 Investigation into the practice of “ROBBING” American Companies and, in turn, the American Taxpayer.

The European Union will pay a very big price for this illegal and highly unethical conduct, which I have consistently warned them about.

The penalties will be entirely reversed and, we anticipate, a substantial TARIFF to be placed on them at the earliest possible moment.

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Google’s €890m EU Fine and the Wrong Fight in Washington

Today the European Commission fined Google €890 million for breaking the Digital Markets Act, the law the bloc wrote to pry open its largest online platforms.

€460 million was for self-preferencing in search: the Commission concluded that Google had given its own shopping, hotel, and travel results the prominent placement and the richer display that rival services could not get.

The other €430 million was for the rules Google Play imposes on the developers who sell through it, rules that kept them from telling their own customers about cheaper offers available elsewhere while charging a steering fee above what the law allows.

The Commission ordered Google to stop and to rank outside services on the same terms as its own.

The reaction from Washington arrived before the fine did. Days earlier, twenty-five Republican members of Congress, seven of them on the House trade subcommittee and one its chairman, wrote to President Trump urging him to treat European enforcement as an act of aggression against American business, a tool, they said, of “economic extraction and regulatory coercion.”

They asked him to reach for Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the statute that lets Washington answer unfair practices with tariffs, and reminded the bloc that “the EU’s access to the U.S. market is not guaranteed.”

The lawmakers also caught the Commission in an awkward inconsistency: Apple, Meta, and Amazon wear the gatekeeper label that pulls them under the law, while the Chinese marketplaces Temu and AliExpress, which reach just as far into European pockets, so far don’t.

The timing sharpened the suspicion, the fine landing hours before a batch of the President’s global tariffs was due to expire. Between the inconsistency and the timing, the charge of persecution has something under it. And yet the conduct Europe fined is the conduct American courts have already condemned, in cases brought by an American company, tried before American judges and an American jury, with no connection to Brussels.

Apple spent the past two years losing to Epic Games in a federal courtroom in California. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found that the company had willfully violated her 2021 order forbidding it to stop developers from steering customers to cheaper payment options outside the App Store. She threw out the commission Apple had tried to charge on those outside sales and referred the matter to federal prosecutors for possible criminal contempt. “That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation,” she wrote; “the cover-up made it worse.” Fortnite was back in the American App Store within days.

Google lost the same fight on the same ground when a California jury decided in December 2023 that the Play Store and its billing system formed an illegal monopoly, and in July 2025 the Ninth Circuit upheld both the verdict and the order that came with it; Google must let rival app stores operate, permit alternative billing, and stop paying companies to keep out of app distribution. Epic’s chief executive called it a total victory. Anti-steering in the App Store, self-preferencing and a closed till in the Play Store; take the European postmark off the charges and they are the same ones a jury in San Francisco already returned.

In May the Supreme Court refused to pause Judge Gonzalez Rogers’s order but in June it agreed to hear Apple’s appeal of the contempt finding, so the question of how far Apple defied the order is still open.

What isn’t open, and what the appeal does not reach, is the 2021 injunction against blocking steering, or the jury’s monopoly verdict against Google that the Ninth Circuit affirmed. The core findings stand. American law looked at what these companies do and called it unlawful; the only live dispute is over how thoroughly Apple flouted the remedy.

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‘VPNs are lawful technical tools,’ says EU Court in landmark Anne Frank copyright ruling

In a major victory for digital rights and common sense, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has officially categorized Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) as “lawful technical tools” while establishing new boundaries for online copyright disputes.

The landmark judgment — handed down in July 2026 — stems from a complex legal battle over the online publication of Anne Frank’s historical manuscripts. At its core, the case forced Europe’s top judges to answer a highly technical question: if a publisher actively tries to block visitors from a specific country, are they still breaking the law if a user sneaks past the digital border using circumvention software?

According to the CJEU, the answer is no. As long as a website employs “state-of-the-art” geo-blocking technology, the publisher cannot be held liable for copyright infringement simply because a determined reader decides to fire up the best VPN to bypass the restrictions.

The ruling sets a massive precedent. It confirms that copyright holders cannot point to the mere existence of VPNs to claim a website’s security measures are completely ineffective.

More importantly for privacy advocates, the court firmly pushed back against the demonization of privacy software, cementing the legitimate status of VPN providers across the European Union.

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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.

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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.”

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