Tag: eu

EU Investigates Meta in Crackdown on Alleged “Rabbit Hole” Effects, Wants It To Push Digital ID

There was a lot of talk about the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) while it was drafted and during the typical-of-the-bloc tortuous process of adoption, but now that it’s been here for a while, we’ve been getting a sense of how it is being put to use.

Utilizing the European digital ID wallet to carry out age verification is just one of the fever pitch ideas here. And EU bureaucrats are trying to make sure that these controversial policies are presented as perfectly in line with how DSA was originally pitched.

The regulation was slammed by opponents as in reality a sweeping online censorship law hiding behind focused, and noble, declarations that its goal was to protect children’s well-being, fight disinformation, etc.

The cold hard reality is that trying to (further) turn the screw – any which way they can – on platforms with the most reach and most influence ahead of an election is simply something that those in power, whether it’s the US or the EU, don’t seem to be able to resist.

Here’s the European Commission (who’s current president is actively campaigning to get reappointed in the wake of next month’s European Parliament elections) opening an investigation into Meta on suspicion its flagship platforms, Facebook and Instagram, create “addictive behavior among children and damage mental health.”

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Another Damning EU Vaccine Safety Report

Part 1 of my analysis of the Periodic Safety Update Report #3 (PSUR #3) for the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 mRNA vaccine, covering the 6-month period of 19 December 2021 through to 18 June 2022, focused on the disturbing pregnancy and lactation cases. Part 2 of the report focuses on the tragic child deaths. 

Firstly, a comparative look at the data in PSUR #3 revealed similar findings in 1st PSUR, apart from a significant 55% increase in the number of case reports and a 36% increase in the number of adverse events recorded. The following similarities were found in both sets of data: three times the number of cases were reported for women; the age group most affected was for 31-50-year-olds; one-third of all cases were classified as serious and a significantly high percentage of cases were classified with outcomes as either unknown or not recovered. 

An Overview of the Data

  • 508,351 cases (individuals) suffering from 1,597,673 adverse events
  • Three times the number of cases were reported for women than men
  • 1/3 of all cases were classified as serious
  • 3,280 deaths reported 
  • 60% of cases were reported with either outcome unknown or not recovered
  • 92% of cases did not have any comorbidities
  • Highest number of cases occurred in the 31-50 year age group
  • Germany had the highest recorded number of cases (22.5% of all reported worldwide 
  • cases)

Germany had the highest number of recorded cases, a total of 114,573, which accounted for 22.5% of all worldwide cases for that 6-month period. It is worth noting that from December 2020 through to June 2022, a staggering 323,684 individual reports of suspected Covid-19 vaccine side effects were received by The Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, an Agency of the German Federal Ministry of Health. Yet, despite this large number, Karl Lauterbach, Germany’s Minister for Health, known for his pro-lockdown and pro-vaccine stance, made the unsubstantiated claim that the “vaccine was without side effects” in August 2021.

However, earlier this year, Lauterbach made a surprising U-turn in a TV interview, where he stated, “These unfortunate cases [of Covid-19 vaccine adverse effects] are heart-breaking and every victim is one too many…” Only recently, the first lawsuit against BioNTech was filed in Germany, by the law firm, Rogert and Ulbrich, with the plaintiff seeking damages due to an injury, allegedly caused by the German vaccine manufacturer’s mRNA product. 

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Pentagon Chief Engaged In Pressuring EU Countries To Give Up Their Patriot Systems

America’s top defense official is engaged in efforts to pressure European countries to give up their own US-made anti-air defenses for Ukraine.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Tuesday he’s been actively encouraging countries to donate their Patriot missile systems to Ukraine. “There are countries that have Patriots, and so what we’re doing is continuing to engage those countries,” Austin testified before a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

“I have talked to the leaders of several countries… myself here in the last two weeks, encouraging them to give up more capability or provide more capability,” he said.

Last Friday Austin announced that as part of a massive new $6 billion aid package for Kiev, the US will provide additional Patriot missiles. This is part of the first approved roll-out in the wake of Biden signing into effect the $61 billion in defense funding for Ukraine belatedly approved by Congress this month.

President Zelensky and his top officials have been essentially begging for more Patriots as Russia continues pummeling its cities and infrastructure. 

A Ukrainian outlet has quoted Zelensky as ramping up the pressure on his backers in NATO:

“Regarding the number of missiles to Patriots, we really expect a positive result in this regard. Thank God that after we convened the Ukraine-NATO Council, we received an assurance that there will be no delays in the process (of supplying missiles to the Patriot systems – ed.), Volodymyr Zelensky said.

Earlier this month a disturbing report by Financial Times identified Greece and Spain as being under the most pressure from Western allies to give up what few Patriot anti-air defense systems that they possess.

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Russian Journalist Calls Out The EU As A Technocracy

Lenin famously defined communism as Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country. In other words, the ideological project of building communism was supplemented by the technocratic project of electrification, the latter being an important source of legitimacy for the new regime.

The present-day European Union is engaged in its own expansive electrification project – the energy transition – that similarly inhabits ground where ideology meets technocracy and underpins legitimacy.

Yet in the past year or so, something has gone badly wrong, and a backlash against the climate agenda and its technocratic enforcers has been spreading across Europe. The energy crisis – far from catapulting the continent further along the path toward a carbon-neutral future as it should have – has exposed just how elusive the goal is, as Europe has scrambled to sign expensive LNG deals and even restart coal-fired plants. Farmers dissatisfied with EU policies that they regard as devastating to their livelihoods have been grumbling for years, but recently their protests have reached a crescendo, and built up political weight. Right-leaning and far-right parties, meanwhile, are gaining ground by the day. Standards of living are dropping and industry is shutting down or moving elsewhere.

Discontent with suffocating bureaucracy and regulation is widespread. A recent survey among German small and medium-sized companies – has registered a massive shift in sentiment against the EU. This is particularly concerning because the so-called German Mittelstand used to be among the strongest pillars of support for European integration.

What is embroiling Europe is deeper than a political crisis – it is approaching what can be called a crisis of legitimacy for the ruling elite. This can be thought of as a metaphysical event that precedes political upheaval, the latter being merely confirmation that such a crisis has taken place. Legitimacy is, of course, a rather nebulous concept, and it defies objective measurement.

Ruling classes throughout history have always advanced various claims about their own legitimacy, without which a stable political order is impossible. In tracing the contours of the current crisis, it’s important to establish what exactly the claims Europe’s technocratic elite have put forth and how they are becoming increasingly difficult to believe.

Ostensibly, the EU’s ruling elite has staked out the green transition as its raison d’être. They claim to have the mandate, vision and competence to see it through and have set clear targets to measure their success.

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Privacy Under Siege: Europol and the UK Crime Agency Target Encryption, Call For Backdoors

What is best known as the “politicization of institutions” in authoritarian societies is these days making a creeping but steady progress in some countries/blocs one would not have suspected of such things until relatively recently.

Here we have Europol (EU’s law enforcement agency) and the supposedly “divested” from the EU shenanigans via Brexit UK – but is it really? – and that country’s National Crime Agency (NCA), teaming up to attack Meta for dozens and dozens of reasonable reasons, but for the one thing the company is apparently trying to do right.

Read the joint declaration here.

And that’s implementing in its products end-to-end encryption (E2EE), the very, necessary, irreplaceable software backbone of a safe and secure internet for everybody. Yet that is what many governments, and here we see the EU via Europol, and the UK, keep attempting to damage.

But mass surveillance is a hard sell, so the established pitch is to link the global and overall internet problem, to that of the safety of children online, and justify it that way.

The Europol executive director, Catherine De Bolle, compared E2EE to “sending your child into a room full of strangers and locking the door.”

And yet, the technological truth and reality of the situation is that undermining E2EE is akin to giving the key to your front door and access to everybody in it, children included, to somebody you “trust” (say, governments and organizations who like you to take their trustworthiness for granted).

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New EU Rule BANS Garden Bonfires

It’s now gone a few years since the British left the EU, in part because they didn’t like all the restrictions and rules that they were coming up with.

Now there is a new rule.

People will be banned from starting bonfires in their garden to burn garden waste such as grass, leafs and sticks.

This is because the new law requires that food and organic waste be sorted and recycled.

Meaning that people who are tending their garden will have to either compost their garden waster or deliver it in for recycling.

In Scandinavia it is tradition in the spring where homeowners tend their garden and start bonfires to burn up garden waste, which will now be banned.

People are now paying with microchips in their hand.

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Switzerland “Violated Human Rights” By Not Tackling Climate-Change Quickly Enough, ECHR Rules In Landmark Case

National governments are infringing on citizens’ human rights by not doing enough to tackle climate change, the European Court of Human Rights has held in a landmark ruling that could have far-reaching consequences and influence climate policy across the continent.

In a highly-anticipated judgment, the Strasbourg court on Tuesday sided with a group of Swiss pensioners who brought a claim against their national government for its perceived failure to act sufficiently in reducing carbon emissions, claiming that existing climate policy was violating their human rights.

The members of the KlimaSeniorinnen group, supported by environmental campaign groups such as Greenpeace, argued that elderly citizens are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, citing the fact that excess deaths occur more regularly among the elderly during periods of extreme heat because they are less able to regulate their body temperature.

The group also claimed that heat waves impact the mental well-being of elderly citizens more because they are less able to go outside and withstand the heat, which they argue affects their quality of life.

The association relied on Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the general right to life, and Article 8, which guarantees the right to private and family life.

Domestic governments are obliged to take “reasonable and appropriate measures” to secure these rights, steps members of the KlimaSeniorinnen group claimed the Swiss government had not taken.

The litigation had been appealed by the group up to the top human rights court in Europe after its claim was rejected first by the Federal Administrative Court in Switzerland and then by the Federal Supreme Court, the country’s highest ruling body.

The judgment is the third of three similar cases the court was asked to consider in respect to the correlation between climate change and human rights and sets a precedent that all national courts in Council of Europe member states will be required to adhere to.

It had recently dismissed the other two cases, brought by Portuguese youths and a former French mayor who had claimed their respective national governments had infringed on their human rights by not being ambitious enough with their climate targets.

The move could see governments across Europe required to take even greater measures to press on with reducing carbon emissions and pursuing a green agenda that many citizens believe is being wrongly prioritized and expedited to their own detriment.

Climate activists celebrated the ruling outside the Strasbourg court on Tuesday, accompanied by Swedish climate zealot Greta Thunberg.

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EU’s Plan To Mass Surveil Private Chats Has Leaked

The latest version of the proposed European Parliament (EP) and EU Council regulation to adopt new rules related to combating child sexual abuse has been made available online.

Despite its declared goal, the proposal, which first saw the light of day in May 2022 and is referred to by opponents as “chat control” is in fact a highly divisive draft of legislation that aims to accomplish the stated objective through mass surveillance of citizens’ private communications.

Now, the French site contexte.com has the full text of the newest version of the proposal – yet another controversial undertaking of the current, 6-month Belgian EU presidency. Judging by the leaked document, the key and most contentious components of “chat control” have not been changed.

German EP member (MEP) Patrick Breyer and long-time vocal critic of the proposal said on his blog that the text would be discussed by a law enforcement working party at the Council on Wednesday, with the target date for adoption being sometime in June.

That will happen once any political differences have been smoothed over at the EU’s Committee of Permanent Representatives (“COREPER”).

Commenting on the development, Breyer remarked that the Council’s legal service has also confirmed that the new version “does not change the nature of detection orders.”

“Limiting bulk chat searches to ‘high-risk services’ is meaningless because every communication service is misused also for sharing illegal images and therefore has an imminently high risk of abuse,” the MEP noted of the latest proposal, adding:

“Informing law enforcement only of repeat hits is also meaningless, as falsely flagged beach pictures or consensual sexting rarely involve just a single photo.”

He went on to explain that the upcoming regulation is set up in a way that will result in the end of the privacy of people’s digital communications, since the subject of content searches will be “millions” of chats and photos, including those belonging to persons who have no links to child sexual abuse.

And because the technology proposed to carry out the mass surveillance is unreliable, there are also risks of this content getting leaked.

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Head of Controversial Global Engagement Center Admits Europe’s Regulatory Power Over Social Media Censorship Enforcement

The head of the US State Department’s highly controversial Global Engagement Center (GEC), James Rubin, appears to be on a “press tour” to promote more stringent regulation around social media, and more censorship.

Rubin is doing this seemingly oblivious of the “elephant in the room” – that GEC is at the center of scandals involving government/Big Tech collusion (this bureau engaged in flagging posts on social media) and even lawsuits stemming from these accusations.

Many of Rubin’s comments made on a recent Politico podcast episode compare and contrast the degree to which the EU and the US are able to regulate social media (and stifle speech).

He also seeks to reinforce the perception of GEC not as a government workaround for carrying out censorship on privately-owned platforms (which would be illegal in the US), but as an entity that is vital in combating “disinformation.”

In this case, AI is considered as a “force for good,” as Rubin revealed GEC would start using it to counter what it decides to consider as “disinformation,” and the policy is also to make sure as many other countries as possible fall in line with the US on this issue.

Regarding what the US could learn from others, Rubin singled out the EU where regulatory frameworks allow the authorities to carry out control and censorship of online information more aggressively, but also praised the work his country, the UK, and Canada are doing together to impose the use of AI watermarks.

Asked to what degree GEC “engages directly” with social platforms, Rubin first deflected by lamenting about how much better equipped the EU is to combat “misinformation” thanks to greater regulatory powers, and then claimed that GEC “does not work with them (platforms) – we meet with them.”

As for what “not working” with someone means according to Rubin, it goes like this: “We try to discuss the trends and the tactics that are used by manipulative countries or non-state actors. We work on that with them. We consult with them. They tell us what they’re seeing. We tell them what we’re seeing.”

He also asserted, “We do not ask them to take things down.”

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E.U. Regulations Created a Port Wine Black Market

People have been making wine in the verdant hills of northern Portugal’s Douro Valley for nearly 2,000 years. Nowadays, the region is home to more than 19,000 grape farmers and 1,000 companies tending terraced vineyards that tower above the Douro River below.

Hundreds of these vineyards are small, often family-owned, properties called quintas, many of which produce port: a syrupy, sweet fortified wine. As a European Union–protected designation of origin product (similar to French Champagne or Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano), the production, labeling, and sale of port are heavily regulated—sometimes to the detriment of the small-scale operators keeping the cultural practice alive.

When I visited the Douro Valley this fall, one quinta owner shared that she couldn’t officially sell port because of burdensome government regulations. All port sellers are required to keep at least 75,000 liters in reserve at all times, she explained—a standard that large producers can meet, but one that might bankrupt a small quinta like hers. In effect, she could only participate in this important cultural heritage as a black market seller.

Francisco Montenegro, owner of the Douro Valley–based Aneto Wines, notes that would-be port sellers have to grapple with several regulations that make it difficult for them to enter the market. On top of the 75,000-liter stock minimum, port producers are allowed to sell or market only one-third of their output, “thus forcing the producer to let [two-thirds] of their wines age.” They have to register under a specific tax status “as they work with spirits,” which requires them to “pay more customs taxes.” Government regulations also mandate that producers “wait at least 3 or 4 years if they want to bottle a normal tawny” port, Montenegro says.

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