Gates of Vienna News Feed 12/4/2018

French President Emmanuel Macron backed down and suspended the new fuel tax for six months, but leaders of the “Yellow Vest” movement say it is not enough, that the tax must be entirely abolished. Meanwhile, the latest polls say that Mr. Macron is disapproved of by 76% of the French public.

In other news, after a long legal battle with the Hungarian government, George Soros’ Central European University has been forced to leave Budapest and relocate in Vienna.

To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.

Thanks to Dean, Dora, Insubria, JD, Reader from Chicago, SS, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Financial Crisis
» Goldman Sachs Warns Italy Could be in a Recession Soon
» Market Analyst: The Stock Market Will Lose 60%, Or $20 Trillion in Next Crash
 
USA
» ADL Gives Tim Cook Award for Censoring Online Speech
» Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Calls Sarah Sanders a Liar
» Amazing Miracle: Christian Actor Kevin Sorbo Says That a Giant California Wildfire Stopped 3 Feet From His Home
» Antifa Vandalizes Purdue College Republicans Adviser’s Home With ‘Nazi Lives Here’
» Antifa Goon Threatens Journalist During Seattle Protest: ‘Death is Coming’
» Avenatti Announces That He Will Not Run for President in 2020
» Bannon Appearance Canceled, Debater Said
» Conservative Writer Files Criminal Complaint Against Mueller
» Democrats Continue Legal Battle to Reverse Election Day Results in North Carolina
» Drake University Student Charged in Racist Note Investigation
» Lawyers Seeking Access to Sealed Julian Assange Case Argue DOJ Lacks Justification for Secrecy
» Maxine Wants Revenge
» Mueller’s Perjury Traps
» USMCA Entrenches Tech Companies’ Right to Censor
» Weekly Standard Employees Brace for the Worst as Rumors Swirl Surrounding Mag’s Imminent Demise
 
Canada
» Canada Desperately Looking to Fill 430,000 Vacant Jobs
» CSIS Director Warns of State-Sponsored Espionage Threat to 5G Networks
» ISIS Knife, Bomb Christmas Threat Targets Downtown Toronto Square
» Regina Man Charged With Attempted Murder After 20-Year-Old Stabbed in Head
 
Europe and the EU
» ‘Anti-Nationalist’ Macron Disapproved by 76% of French Amid Massive Protests
» Brexit Leader Nigel Farage Quits UKIP, The Party He Led for Nearly a Decade
» EU Has Too Many Problems to Sanction Italy — Salvini
» Farage: Macron ‘Virtue Signals’ To the World, Is ‘Disconnected’ From the French People
» France Introduces 6-Month Moratorium on Fuel Tax Increases
» France: Pictures: Students Join Anti-Macron Disorder, Set Fires, Block Over 100 High Schools
» Hungary: Soros-Founded University Says ‘Forced Out of Budapest’
» Italy: Salvini Hits Back After Turin Prosecutor Tweet Reprimand
» Italy: Rome Prosecutors Probing 5 Egyptian Officials Over Regeni
» Italy: Berlusconi Paid Ruby 5 mn Via Antigua — Ex-Lawyer
» Macron Blinks: France Suspends Fuel Tax Hike After “Yellow Vest” Riots… But it’s Not Enough
» Not Enough: Yellow Vests to Reject Temporary Suspension of Fuel Tax Rises in France
» Paris Tax Revolts: The World Begins to Realize the Truth About Government
» Polish President Discusses Climate Change With Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger at Climate Conference
» Significant Majority of French Support Anti-Macron Movement Despite Violent Protests
» Soros-Funded University Forced Out of Hungary
» Soros Funded University ‘Leaves’ Hungary, But Gov’t Calls it ‘Political Bluff’
» Sweden’s Centre Party Gives Lofven Last Chance Before PM Vote
» Tommy Robinson Hits Back at Nigel Farage and Says Nigel Doesn’t Care About UKIP’s Future
» UK Government Humiliated Over Brexit Legal Advice
» UK Govt Forced to Publish Full Brexit Legal Documents After Losing Key Vote
» UK: “The Worst Deal in History”: Theresa May’s Surrender
» Yellow Vests Win and Force French Government to Suspend Planned Fuel Tax Increase
 
Russia
» Christmas Under Marx and Lenin
 
Far East
» Chinese CRISPR Scientist Who Allegedly Edited Infants’ Genes is Reportedly Missing
» The Impact of Chinese Espionage on the United States
 
Australia — Pacific
» Exclusive: Sparkly, Opal-Filled Fossils Reveal New Dinosaur Species
» Muslim Cricket Star Usman Khawaja’s Brother is Arrested Over ‘ISIS Terror Hit List’ Found at a University — as Police Claim He Faked the Document to ‘Set Up Another Student After a Dispute Over a Girl’
» The One Main Factor Driving Young Muslims Into Extremism is Revealed — and it’s Not Hardline Preachers or Mosques
 
Immigration
» Australian Refugee Soccer Player is Arrested in Thailand Over Outstanding Vandalism Charges — and Now Faces Ten Years Behind Bars in His Home Country
» Could the Belgian Government Fall Over Dissent on the UN Migration Pact?
» Democrat Rep. Pramila Jayapal: CEOs Must Get ‘Millions’ of Cheap Visa-Workers
» Here They Are, The National Petitions Against the UN Migration Pact — Did You Sign?
» Italy: Around 2,000 Migrants Expected to Leave Every Month Under Tougher Rules
» ‘Migrant Free’ Slovakia is in Top Three of Safest EU Countries
» Migrant Males Arrested at Two German Christmas Markets After Violence
» Nancy Pelosi Promises to Pass Illegal Alien Amnesty Via Dream Act
» Refugee Beats Praying Priest to Death With Metal Cross in Germany
» Seven Adult Migrants Suspected of Raping 10-Year-Old Finnish Girl
 
Culture Wars
» #MeToo backfires: Wall Street’s New Rule is ‘Avoid Women at All Cost’
» Criminal Record for British Doctor Who Illegally Gave Sex Change Hormones to Kids
» Hollywood Producer Ryan Murphy Launching Multi-Million Dollar Crusade to Defeat ‘Anti-LGBTQ’ GOP Lawmakers
» The War on Standards, STEM Edition
» Wall Street Execs Too Afraid to Hire Women in Wake of #MeToo: Report
 
General
» Microsoft is Building a Chromium-Powered Web Browser That Will Replace Edge on Windows 10
» The Elite Are Creating an Authoritarian ‘Beast System’, and Those That Dissent Could Lose Everything
» What Makes BeOs and Haiku Unique
 

Goldman Sachs Warns Italy Could be in a Recession Soon

Goldman Sachs has accused Italy of ‘casting a dark cloud’ over the European market outlook.

It isn’t a secret. Italy has gone head to head with the European Commission over Italy’s 2019 budget.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Market Analyst: The Stock Market Will Lose 60%, Or $20 Trillion in Next Crash

Market analyst John Hussman, who is a market bear, has claimed that the stock market will lose about $20 trillion in the next crash. That is equal to 60% of the market value.

Hussman has been warning that stock valuations have been extreme for years, and is long overdue for a return to historical norms, according to Investopedia. “The only time we’ve ever seen a confluence of risk factors anywhere close to those of today was the week of March 24, 2000, which marked the peak of the technology bubble,” he wrote in a recent blog post quoted by Business Insider.

Hussman is blaming the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program for this major problem. “The current back-slapping about the success of extraordinary monetary policy is a lot like declaring victory in a football game at halftime, just before a flock of fire-breathing dragons swoops onto the field and eats the leading team. We have to allow for the possibility that the second half of the game will be violently unrecognizable,” Hussman said. “The Fed created yet another yield-seeking bubble that has encouraged vastly expanded indebtedness in every sector of the economy.”

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

ADL Gives Tim Cook Award for Censoring Online Speech

Apple CEO says it’s “a sin” to not ban certain people

Apple CEO Tim Cook received a “Courage Against Hate” award from the Anti-Defamation League yesterday for censoring online speech, including Infowars’ Alex Jones, whom Cook referred to as a “violent conspiracy theorist”.

“At Apple, we believe technology needs to have a clear point of view,” said Cook during his acceptance speech. “This is no time to get tied up in knots. We only have one message for those who seek to push hate, division, or violence: You have no place on our platforms. You have no home here. From the earliest days of iTunes to Apple Music today we have always prohibited music with a history of white supremacy. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do. And as we showed this year, we won’t give a platform to violent conspiracy theorists. Why? Because it’s the right things to do.”

As the Verge noted, Cook’s “violent conspiracy theorists” line “refers to Alex Jones’ Infowars,” which is a defamatory statement because neither Alex Jones or Infowars have ever advocated violence of any kind.

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt subsequently linked “hate speech” with criticism of immigration before praising Cook as “courageous” for banning Alex Jones…

“Apple fired me for not being as woke as the rest of my team,” remarked Alejandrina Gonzalez. “My SJW manager would stalk my social media everyday and then email me commenting about what I said.”

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Calls Sarah Sanders a Liar

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called White House press secretary Sarah Sanders a liar in a tweet to Sanders’ father, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, after he tweeted to chide the “Democratic Socialist” for comparing her election to Congress to the 1969 moon landing.

“Ocasio-Cortez compares her election to moon landing. Huh?” Huckabee tweeted, referring to the remarks Ocasio-Cortez made in a speech. “Big difference. Moon landing was LUNAR, not LOONEY; Moon landing done by ppl who knew what they were doing…those who elected someone who thought there were 3 branches of Congress did NOT”:

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Amazing Miracle: Christian Actor Kevin Sorbo Says That a Giant California Wildfire Stopped 3 Feet From His Home

This story is absolutely amazing. Like so many others, actor Kevin Sorbo and his wife were forced to evacuate from their home during the recent California wildfires, and once they left they were not sure if they would ever see it again. And sure enough, firefighters were not able to hold back the blaze and flames came racing through their neighborhood. Homes all along the street were burned to the ground, including the house immediately next door, but Kevin Sorbo’s house was not touched. In fact, they could see where the flames had literally come within three feet of the house, but then they mysteriously stopped…

“We survived the fires and our house is intact, even though the fire approached and got very close,” Sam Sorbo said in a recent holiday video released by PureFlix.com.

Kevin Sorbo explained that the flames came within three feet of the house — but that the blaze mysteriously stopped short of touching the house.

“Why it stopped, I don’t know,” he said, expressing gratitude that the family home was safe during the deadly blaze. “It’s a miracle.”

If you don’t think that this was a miracle, then how do you explain what happened?

The house right next door was destroyed, along with many others all along that street, but for some reason Kevin Sorbo’s house was unscathed.

Be skeptical if you want, but it is a fact that Kevin Sorbo is a very outspoken believer in Jesus Christ. He has appeared in numerous Christian films, but Hollywood has shunned him in recent years. The following comes from Wikipedia…

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Antifa Vandalizes Purdue College Republicans Adviser’s Home With ‘Nazi Lives Here’

A College Republicans adviser claimed that Antifa activists vandalized his house with the words “Nazi lives here.”

David Bridges, adviser to the Purdue University College Republicans student group, woke up on Nov. 18 to red dye covering his driveway and the words, “Nazi lives here” scrawled in white spray paint on the garage door. Bridges claimed that the perpetrators of the vandalism were Antifa activists, according to the Lafayette Journal & Courier.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Antifa Goon Threatens Journalist During Seattle Protest: ‘Death is Coming’

A left-wing agitator known to Seattle police was caught on tape threatening independent journalist Andy Ngo with death during a left-wing antifa rally over the weekend. “Death is coming to you, dude,” the deranged agitator said while the police stood around and did nothing.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Avenatti Announces That He Will Not Run for President in 2020

Michael Avenatti has long reveled in playing the role of the combative underdog. But the mounting challenges in and outside the courtroom were too much even for him.

The hard-charging Los Angeles attorney pulled the plug on his nascent presidential bid, announcing Tuesday he will not run in 2020.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Bannon Appearance Canceled, Debater Said

Stephen Bannon, the controversial former chief strategist for President Donald Trump, will not be coming to Missoula.

Michel Valentin, a former faculty member at the University of Montana who had agreed to debate Bannon, said Tuesday he received an email from an organizer of the event saying Bannon was not available.

“It’s too bad because I was really psyched up. I was ready,” Valentin said.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Conservative Writer Files Criminal Complaint Against Mueller

Conservative writer Jerome Corsi has officially filed a criminal complaint against Robert Mueller. Corsi alleges that Mueller is on a rampant bullying bid in an attempt to get the writer to bear false testimony against President Donald Trump.

On Monday, the complaint, which Corsi had threatened for days, was filed. It is the latest escalation between Mueller’s team and its investigation targets, according to a report by Fox News. The mainstream media is painting Corsi as a conspiracy theorist for refusing to tow the government’s line.

The 78-page document, asserting the existence of a “slow-motion coup against the president,” was filed to a range of top law enforcement officials including Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, D.C.’s United States Attorney Jessie Liu, and the Bar Disciplinary Counsel. The complaint clearly states that Corsi has been bullied into lying. “Dr. Corsi has been criminally threatened and coerced to tell a lie and call it the truth,” the complaint states.

The complaint states that Mueller’s office is now “knowingly and deceitfully threatening to charge Dr. Corsi with an alleged false statement,” unless he gives them “false testimony” against Trump and others. —Fox News

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Democrats Continue Legal Battle to Reverse Election Day Results in North Carolina

Democrats continue their full-court legal press to reverse the election day results in the 9th Congressional District of North Carolina where all eight of the counties in the district have certified Republican Mark Harris’s 905 vote victory.

But the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement, which is the only governing body with the legal authority to certify the election and confirm Harris’s seat in the House of Representatives when the 116th Congress convenes in Washington next month, remains steadfast in its unanimous refusal to certify the results of the November 6 election in the state’s 9th Congressional District.

Despite Harris’s call for the board to certify the election late Friday, the board voted seven to two to “hold an evidentiary hearing to address irregularities in the U.S. House District 9 race … on or before December 21”:

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Drake University Student Charged in Racist Note Investigation

An 18-year-old Drake University student has been charged with making false reports to law enforcement in connection with racist notes found on campus last month, Des Moines police said.

Kissie Ram received a misdemeanor summons Monday but was not booked into jail, police said. If found guilty, she could face a fine and be jailed for up to one year.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Lawyers Seeking Access to Sealed Julian Assange Case Argue DOJ Lacks Justification for Secrecy

Attorneys seeking details about the U.S. government’s investigation into WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange argued Monday that the Department of Justice lacks justification for continuing to keep its case completely sealed.

Lawyers for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit organization representing journalists’ interests, raised the claim throughout a 12-page memorandum filed in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, where the group initiated legal proceedings last month seeking access to sealed documents related to the Justice Department’s pending prosecution of the Australian-born WikiLeaks boss.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Maxine Wants Revenge

In a speech at The Proud Bird, a historic restaurant in L.A., Waters made clear her intentions upon assuming the chairmanship:

“I have not forgotten you foreclosed on our houses. I have not forgotten that you undermined our community. I have not forgotten that you sold us those exotic products, had us sign on the line for junk and for mess we could not afford. …What am I going to do you? What I’m going to do you is fair, I’m going to do to you what you did to us!”

A sitting House representative threatening U.S. businesses with retribution is remarkable enough, but retribution for what?

Apart from the dismissal of personal responsibility inherent in the idea that people were somehow forced into purchasing something they couldn’t afford, of note here is how the situation came about in the first place; how citizens of Waters’ community found themselves able to qualify for mortgages that were beyond their financial means. Making such loans is not in a lending institution’s best interests, so why would one do it? The institutions did it because Maxine Waters, among others, forced them to.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s a small cadre of House Democrats, most prominently Waters and Barney Frank (D-MA), worked in cahoots with then-CEO of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines, to loosen mortgage lending standards and practices for the purpose of making homeownership a reality for a greater number of economically disadvantaged Americans. (Raines was subsequently embroiled in a scandal at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that resulted in him having to pay a record $24.7 million settlement.)

At the time Waters heaped praise upon banks and lending institutions for allowing people to sign on the line for loans they could not afford, saying in a September 2003 hearing of the House Committee on Financial Services:

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Mueller’s Perjury Traps

Dropping Paul Manafort as a cooperating witness ruins his credibility as far as anything he told Mueller and any testimony he may be forced to give with respect to that. The lies Mueller is alleging are almost certainly an exercise of Mueller’s specialty, the “perjury trap” he is trying to set for President Trump. It must be assumed the Special Counsel has proof of Manafort’s lies.

Manafort’s defense team has been working with the president’s lawyers since the inception of his plea agreement. The president’s attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, has admitted as much. Mueller is trying to prove collusion between Trump and Manafort with respect to the written answers the president submitted last week in response to Mueller’s questions. If any of Trump’s answers to Mueller’s questions include even one of the same lies as Manafort, it would not only be perjury but the “high crime” the incoming Democratic House majority will use to initiate Articles of Impeachment.

It doesn’t even have to be a big lie — saying he didn’t know of the Trump Tower meeting between Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskya (who coincidentally, had ties to Fusion GPS, having dined with Glenn Simpson both before and after the meeting), when Mueller has evidence he did, would be enough for Mueller to ruin Trump’s presidency.

So, denying foreknowledge of a meeting that was not illegal and certainly didn’t rise to the things Hillary and company did with the Steele Dossier may be insignificant, but it still would be a false statement.

That’s how Mueller got General Michael Flynn, who related a conversation he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that differed from the recordings Mueller had of the meeting. The meeting would be a legitimate task for an incoming national security advisor and even though interviewing FBI agents didn’t think he was lying and merely misspoke or misremembered, the inconsistency was used to indict him. Mueller knew what was said because he had recordings of the conversation. In other words, it was a perjury trap.

It’s what he’s trying to do to Jerome Corsi also, a septuagenarian who couldn’t remember forwarding an email. Mueller had seized his computers and thus already knew he had forwarded the email. Apparently, poor memory can result in jail time for Corsi even though there was nothing illegal about the email itself.

Mueller wanted to flip him, and according to Corsi, lie and say he was the conduit between Assange and Roger Stone (a Trump confidant) for stolen Hillary emails. In doing so, Mueller was attempting to draw a line from Assange through Corsi to Stone and then to his real target, the president.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

USMCA Entrenches Tech Companies’ Right to Censor

USMCA entrenches the tech giants’ legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

President Trump hailed the trade agreement he signed with Mexico and Canada last week as “great for all our countries.” Perhaps he doesn’t know that the NAFTA-replacing trade agreement, USMCA, gives tech giants in Silicon Valley a special legal privilege to censor his own supporters — and anyone else they find “objectionable.”

Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube all engaged in pre-election censorship against Republicans and Trump supporters. Yet they’ve managed to sneak a liability protection into President Trump’s trade bill that would make it even easier for them to censor their own users.

USMCA entrenches the tech giants’ legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which grant them legal immunity for user-generated content. This is an important part of the law that allows tech platforms to host a wide variety of speech with light-touch moderation.

But USMCA also entrenches tech companies’ right to censor without liability. Article 19.17 of the trade agreement gives tech companies immunity from any lawsuits arising from actions taken to “restrict material it considers to be harmful or objectionable.”

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Weekly Standard Employees Brace for the Worst as Rumors Swirl Surrounding Mag’s Imminent Demise

On Tuesday, Emerald Robinson, chief White House correspondent for One America News Network (OANN), unleashed a powerful rumor that The Weekly Standard is on its last legs. Sources confirmed to CNN that Editor-in-Chief Stephen Hayes warned staff the future of the paper is uncertain. One of the magazine’s key editors, Bill Kristol, has adopted a firmly anti-Trump stance, becoming a well-known #NeverTrump leader.

“BREAKING: Multiple sources tell me that neocon magazine [The Weekly Standard] is expected to close its operations in a few weeks,” Robinson tweeted. “It had lost many subscribers since the 2016 election as its [Never Trumper] editors [Bill Kristol, Stephen Hayes, and Charlie Sykes] publicly aligned with the Left.”

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Canada Desperately Looking to Fill 430,000 Vacant Jobs

A business group warned on Tuesday that a labor shortage in Canada is deepening, with more than 430,000 jobs at small and medium-sized firms remaining unfilled for at least four months.

The job vacancy rate has risen to 3.3 percent, from 2.9 percent a year ago, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) said in a report.

This is “above the records set before the 2008 financial crisis, and businesses are really feeling the pressure,” said CFIB chief economist Ted Mallett.

           — Hat tip: Dora [Return to headlines]
 

CSIS Director Warns of State-Sponsored Espionage Threat to 5G Networks

Canada’s top spy used his first public speech to warn of increasing state-sponsored espionage through technology such as next-generation 5G mobile networks.

Canadian Security Intelligence Service director David Vigneault’s comments come as three of the country’s Five Eyes intelligence-sharing allies have barred wireless carriers from installing equipment made by China’s Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. in the 5G infrastructure they are building to provide an even-more-connected network for smartphone users.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

ISIS Knife, Bomb Christmas Threat Targets Downtown Toronto Square

An ISIS-supporting media group depicted a hoodie-clad, knife-wielding jihadist approaching a Christmas-decorated Toronto shopping and entertainment district in a new threat.

The image shows Yonge-Dundas Square lit up at night, with the Christmas tree outside of the Dundas subway station entrance. Photoshopped at the base of the Christmas tree are two grenades, sticks of dynamite with a timer, and a blood-spattered backpack.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Regina Man Charged With Attempted Murder After 20-Year-Old Stabbed in Head

A 21-year-old Regina man is facing numerous charges after a man was stabbed in the head.

Officers were sent to the 1700 block of Quebec Street around 7 a.m. CST on Saturday, according to a police news release.

When police arrived, they were told the 20-year-old victim had been taken to hospital by friends.

Police went into the house searching for other injured people and wound up detaining four people, who were later released without charges.

A further investigation resulted in police arresting the 21-year-old suspect later that evening.

He is facing a number of charges, including attempted murder and carrying a concealed weapon, and made his first court appearance on Monday morning.

Police say the victim sustained numerous injuries and was treated in hospital.

           — Hat tip: Dean [Return to headlines]
 

‘Anti-Nationalist’ Macron Disapproved by 76% of French Amid Massive Protests

Populism is on the rise. Unfortunately for French President Emmanuel Macron, he isn’t a populist, his disapproval rating now at a colossal 76 per cent.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Brexit Leader Nigel Farage Quits UKIP, The Party He Led for Nearly a Decade

Brexit leader and President Trump confidant Nigel Farage has announced he is leaving the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the British political force he led on-and-off for nearly a decade over decisions by its new leader Gerrard Batten.

Announcing his departure on his LBC talk radio slot Tuesday evening, Mr Farage reflected on his time in UKIP which he said he had joined in 1992 when it was known as the Anti Federalist League.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

EU Has Too Many Problems to Sanction Italy — Salvini

Confident of budget deal, working ‘with alacrity’04 December 201819:03 News

(ANSA) — Rome, December 4 — The EU has too many problems to sanction Italy for its 2019 budget, Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini said Tuesday.

“I don’t think the EU is enjoying a state of health such as to allow it to question and sanction Europe’s second industrial power,” he said.

Salvini added he was confident that a budget deal would be found, “we are working with alacrity on it”.

           — Hat tip: Insubria [Return to headlines]
 

Farage: Macron ‘Virtue Signals’ To the World, Is ‘Disconnected’ From the French People

Brexit architect Nigel Farage has condemned France’s President Emmanuel Macron for spending more time “virtue signalling” to the world than connecting with his own people, which he said has resulted in the escalation of violence at Yellow Vest protests.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

France Introduces 6-Month Moratorium on Fuel Tax Increases

France’s government officially canceled a meeting with Yellow Vest protestors scheduled for Tuesday, France24 reported

French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe has announced the suspension of fuel tax hikes which triggered massive unrest across the country.

The French government will suspend the fuel tax rise for six months to calm down the “Yellow Vest” protests, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said in a televised speech broadcast on Tuesday. He stressed that no tax should endanger public unity and “the violence must stop.”

France’s government officially canceled a meeting with Yellow Vest protestors scheduled for Tuesday, France24 reported…

Experts suggested the protests are targeting government policies in general rather than fuel taxes as such. Jean Bricmont, a French writer and political commentator, told RT there is not much that French authorities could do to defuse tensions as Paris “has to obey the orders from the European Commission.”

Bricmont suggested that Macron “doesn’t realize the depth of the crisis” and has nothing to offer to resolve it. Two-thirds of the French support the upheaval, according to a new poll by OpinionWay. The survey asked over 1000 people and 66 percent answered that they stand for the protesters.

[Comment: A 6 month delay before implementing it again. I’m surprised he didn’t tell them to eat cake.]

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

France: Pictures: Students Join Anti-Macron Disorder, Set Fires, Block Over 100 High Schools

Over one hundred high schools across France have been blocked or otherwise disrupted, with a fire seriously damaging one school in Toulouse, as students protest education reforms.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Hungary: Soros-Founded University Says ‘Forced Out of Budapest’

Budapest (AFP) — Hungary’s Central European University announced Monday it had been “forced” to move its most prestigious programmes to Vienna after a long and bitter legal battle with Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Italy: Salvini Hits Back After Turin Prosecutor Tweet Reprimand

Spataro should retire or run for office replies interior min’

(ANSA) — Turin, December 4 — Interior Minister and Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini hit back Tuesday after Turin Chief Prosecutor Armando Spataro said that a tweet about the arrest of alleged members of a Nigerian mafia gang in the northern city had risked compromising the operation. In a press release, Spataro said Salvini’s announcement on social media about the detention of “15 Nigerian mafiosi” had risked “damaging the positive outcome of an operation that was still taking place”. Spataro said that “it is to be hoped that in the future the interior minister avoids similar communications” or finds out beforehand the time of the operation “in order to avoid the risk of damaging ongoing investigations”. League party leader Salvini said Spataro’s intervention was “unacceptable” and he “should retire”.

Salvini said he had been informed of the operation by Italy’s chief of police at 07:22 in the morning and had felt “free and honoured to thank and compliment the forces of law and order”.

He said the police had confirmed to him that the operation was over, and had a message to prove it.

Salvini added that his critics should run for office if they don’t like the way he does things.

“I’m fed up of offences, insults, threats and attacks on a daily basis,” Salvini said, announcing he would go live on Facebook later on Tuesday to defend his record.

“I have been interior minister for six months and I think I’m doing a good job, looking at the results. “If someone doesn’t like it, they should stand in the next elections, but for the moment let us work in peace”.

           — Hat tip: Insubria [Return to headlines]
 

Italy: Rome Prosecutors Probing 5 Egyptian Officials Over Regeni

Italian researcher tortured, murdered in Egypt in 2016

(ANSA) — Rome, December 4 — Rome prosecutors have put five Egyptian officials under investigation in relation to the death of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni in Egypt in 2016, sources said on Tuesday. The officials are members of a secret services department and of an investigative police unit in Cairo, the sources said.

They are probed for alleged involvement in kidnapping, according to the sources. They were named as General Sabir Tareq, colonels Usham Helmy and Ather Kamal, and major Magdi Sharif, as well as agent Mhamoud Najem.

Regeni, 28, disappeared in Cairo on January 25, 2016, the heavily policed fifth anniversary of the uprising that felled former strongman Hosni Mubarak, and his mutilated body was found in a ditch on the road to Alexandria on February 3. His parents said they could only recognise him “from the tip of his nose”.

Regeni, from the northern Friuli region, was researching Egyptian street sellers’ unions for Cambridge University, a politically sensitive issue. The head of the Cairo street sellers’ union said he flagged up Regeni to the security services.

Deputy Premier and Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said Tuesday that Italy wanted the names of the people responsible. “We have been waiting for three years,” Salvini said.

“I want to maintain good relations with Egypt and I’ll do everything to have good economic, cultural, trade and social relations with a friendly country.

“But as an Italian, I expect the names and surnames of the culprits”.

           — Hat tip: Insubria [Return to headlines]
 

Italy: Berlusconi Paid Ruby 5 mn Via Antigua — Ex-Lawyer

2 mn for her ex-boyfriend, 3 for her says Verzini

(ANSA) — Milan, December 4 — Silvio Berlusconi gave a former underage prostitute called Ruby five million euros via an Antigua account when he was embroiled in a court case for paying her for sex in 2011, her former lawyer Egidio Verzini told ANSA Tuesday.

The money was sent via the Antigua Commercial Bank and paid into a Mexican account, he said.

Two million of it went to Ruby’s former boyfriend Luca Risso, Verzini said, while three “went from Mexico to Dubai and went exclusively to Ruby”.

The three-time ex-premier and media magnate was eventually acquitted of paying for sex with an underage prostitute because a court found he did not know she was 17 at the time.

Berlusconi’s lawyer Niccolò Ghedini said Verzini’s claims were false and the centre-right Forza Italia leader would sue for libel.

           — Hat tip: Insubria [Return to headlines]
 

Macron Blinks: France Suspends Fuel Tax Hike After “Yellow Vest” Riots… But it’s Not Enough

Update: Despite French President Emmanuel Macron letting his people “eat cake” with a six-month suspension of the government’s new “climate change” fuel taxes, the so-called “Yellow Vest” movement which has been protesting throughout France for more than three weeks is still spitting mad.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Not Enough: Yellow Vests to Reject Temporary Suspension of Fuel Tax Rises in France

Representatives from the Yellow Vest movement have said that a temporary suspension of a further tax increase by the government does not go far enough, maintaining the taxes should be cut altogether.

The government of Emmanuel Macron will announce Tuesday morning a moratorium on the increase of the fuel tax, slated for January 1st, according to government sources speaking to franceinfo and confirmed by Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The freeze on taxes is believed to last several months, with Prime Minister Édouard Philippe also set to announce other measures in an attempt to appease protesters.

However, Benjamin Cauchy, who has become a major figure in the Yellow Vest (or Gilets Jaunes) movement, told franceinfo, “We will not be put to sleep by a moratorium, the issues are much wider than that.”

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Paris Tax Revolts: The World Begins to Realize the Truth About Government

The world appears to be slowly awakening to the disaster that governments have caused and funded by theft over the course of human history. The French revolts, which began over an increase in the petrol tax, left 133 people injured and over 400 arrested after the people rose up finally realizing that all taxation is theft.

As governments across the globe increasingly enslave the tax cattle, more and more are waking up to the violence and horrific atrocities committed in the name of government with funds stolen from innocent people. Paris was only the latest example of people beginning to realize they are enslaved to the political elites and are finally demanding their freedom and refusing to be stolen from any longer.

French President Emmanuel Macron was chairing an urgent security meeting today following the violence by anti-government protesters in the streets of the French capital, according to a report by The Evening Standard. The protest against rising taxes and the high cost of living forced by government regulations turned into a riot in the French capital, as activists wearing yellow jackets torched cars, smashed windows, looted shops, and tagged the Arc de Triomphe with multi-colored graffiti. The violence is certainly unacceptable, however, people seem to be at the beginning stages of the realization that government is not a solution, and is actually a problem.

Macron has already vowed that those responsible for the violence will pay for their actions in the streets of Paris. A government spokesman, Benjamin Griveaux, said that Saturday’s violence was due to people who hijacked the protest, people who came “to loot, break and hit police forces.” When he was asked why thousands of French police could not prevent the damage, especially to the nation’s Arc de Triomphe monument, Griveaux said: “Yesterday we made a choice … to protect people before material goods.”

But the protesters say they have had enough of their own stolen funds being used to further their enslavement by the government. “It’s difficult to reach the end of the month. People work and pay a lot of taxes and we are fed up,” said Rabah Mendez, a protester who came to march peacefully in Paris.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Polish President Discusses Climate Change With Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger at Climate Conference

World leaders and non-government organisations, as well as some celebrities are meetingin Katowice, Poland for the UN climate conference known as COP24, the short name for the 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

On Day Two of negotiations the Polish President took a meeting with former Hollywood celebrity, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Significant Majority of French Support Anti-Macron Movement Despite Violent Protests

Following some of the worst riots seen in Paris in decades, the vast majority of French people still support the goals of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests).

A survey of 1,016 people conducted by the polling firm Harris has revealed that even after the riots that saw cars and buildings burned on the Champs-Élysées, 72 per cent of respondents said they still support the movement, broadcaster RTL reports.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Soros-Funded University Forced Out of Hungary

A university funded by George Soros has been forced out of the billionaire’s native country of Hungary, according to a Monday report.

“The Central European University, founded by George Soros, said on Monday it had been forced out of Hungary in “an arbitrary eviction” that violated academic freedom, and it confirmed plans to enroll new students in neighboring Austria next year,” said Reuters.

Soros, who donates millions to leftist nonprofits mostly in the United States, has been engulfed in a battler with the right-leaning leader of his native land, Prime Minister Victor Orban. The main point of contention is immigration policy. Soros often funds open borders groups, while Hungary has refused to partake in the harboring of Middle Eastern and African migrants. Orban forced Soros’ Open Societies Foundation out of Hungary earlier this year.

CEU is not thrilled with its eviction.

“CEU has been forced out,” said CEU President Michael Ignatieff, according to the report. “This is unprecedented. A U.S. institution has been driven out of a country that is a NATO ally. A European institution has been ousted from a member state of the EU.”

[Comment: Hungary shows the way.]

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Soros Funded University ‘Leaves’ Hungary, But Gov’t Calls it ‘Political Bluff’

Budapest’s Central European University (CEU) will launch all US-accredited degree programs in Vienna in September 2019, the university said on Monday.

CEU said in a statement that it was making the announcement today in order to guarantee that it can recruit students in time for the beginning of the next academic year.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Sweden’s Centre Party Gives Lofven Last Chance Before PM Vote

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) — Sweden’s Centre Party said on Tuesday it would give Prime Minister Stefan Lofven’s Social Democrats a “final chance” to meet demands for reforms, before deciding whether to oppose him in a vote next week that could doom his bid for a second term.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Tommy Robinson Hits Back at Nigel Farage and Says Nigel Doesn’t Care About UKIP’s Future

Tommy Robinson has savaged Nigel Farage after Farage “slandered” him on his LBC show. The former UKIP Leader repeated his accusation that if UKIP march alongside Tommy next Sunday against Theresa May’s sell-out deal they will “turn into the new BNP.”

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

UK Government Humiliated Over Brexit Legal Advice

Perhaps as a foreshadowing of what is to come in 7 days time when the House Of Commons vote on Treason May’s Withdrawal Agreement, the government was humiliated today in the Commons and has been forced ro back down.

MP’s voted by 311 to 293 to find Ministers in contempt of Parliament for refusing to publish the full legal advice provided by Attorney General Geoffrey Cox on the legalities of the Withdrawal Agreement. It had previously tried to have the matter reffeded to a committee but that proposal was defeated by 4 votes.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

UK Govt Forced to Publish Full Brexit Legal Documents After Losing Key Vote

The British government has been found in contempt of the Houses of Parliament for the first time in history and will be forced to publish the full legal advice it received on Theresa May’s Brexit deal after it was defeated in a key Parliament vote Tuesday.

Members of Parliament from six opposition parties — including the Democratic Unionist Party who are theoretically allies of the government and had signed an agreement to prop up Theresa May’s minority administration in — defeated the government on a motion of contempt by 311 votes to 293.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

UK: “The Worst Deal in History”: Theresa May’s Surrender

But, we have nearly left the EU haven’t we? After all, we keep hearing about this deal. We must be nearly there by now, surely?

Just because some of us are immersed in this stuff, many of us are not. Back in the real world where people are trying to find their bus passes, generally keep warm, or asking who will do the school pick-up, Brexit is not everyone’s first and overwhelming thought.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Yellow Vests Win and Force French Government to Suspend Planned Fuel Tax Increase

Yellow Vests Movement win as Paris announced a suspension of the Fuel Tax Hikes after three weeks of protests.

Protests beginning on 17 November against Macron’s government’s increase in fuel tax, having risen 23 per cent in just 12 months, the Yellow Vest movement has literally spread throughout Europe as ordinary people have taken a stand against their elitist governments, with France having completely lost control over its people.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Christmas Under Marx and Lenin

Between his campaign against President Gerald Ford in 1975-76 and his race against Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan delivered more than 1,000 radio broadcasts. In fact, Mr. Reagan wrote most of those three-minute broadcasts himself. In one broadcast during the Christmas season, Reagan shared a story about Christmas in the Ukraine before and after communism.

In an effort to resist Christians, communist leaders secularized a favorite Ukrainian Christmas carol, “Nova Radist Stala” (Joyous News Has Come to Us). The original song began with these words: “The joyous news has come which never was before. Over a cave above a manger a bright star has lit the world, where Jesus was born from a virgin maiden…” Communists feared the public outcry that would follow a complete ban on Christmas, so they began to slowly secularize the holiday. The first rewrite of the song began: “The joyous news has come which never was before, a red star with five tails has brightly lit the world.” The second rewrite went further: “The joyous news has come which never was before. Long-awaited star of freedom lit the skies in October [the month of the Revolution]. Where formerly lived the kings and had the roots their nobles, there today with simple folks, Lenin’s glory hovers.”

The former Soviet Union eventually began banning Christmas commemorations. St. Nicholas was replaced with “Did Moroz,” or Grandfather Frost. This Stalinist creation wears a red cap and long white beard of Santa Claus, but he delivers gifts to children on New Year’s Eve. Christmas trees were also banned, but people continued to trim their New Year’s trees. Communism folded all Christmas celebrations into a New Year’s celebration.

Christians in the former Soviet Union exhibited bravery and courage in confronting communism’s anti-Christmas campaign. One person recalled how the young people would go out in the streets and sing Christmas carols, knowing that if police heard them, they would be arrested. In communist Romania, Rev. Geza Palffy, a Roman Catholic priest, delivered a sermon in 1983, protesting against the fact that December 25 had been declared a work day instead of a holiday. The next day he was arrested by secret police, beaten, imprisoned and died. Inside and outside the Iron Curtain, Ukrainians never stopped singing: “We beg you our Lord, we pray to you today. Grant us freedom, return glory to our Mother Ukraine.” Mr. Reagan ended his broadcast: “I guess we all hope their prayer is answered.” Indeed it was.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Chinese CRISPR Scientist Who Allegedly Edited Infants’ Genes is Reportedly Missing

Local Chinese media says the controversial scientist has been placed under “house arrest” by a Shenzhen university which has since denied the claim.

Chinese scientist He Jiankui earned worldwide notoriety last week after claiming to have engineered the first gene-edited babies. Now, He’s whereabouts are unknown according to local media.

The rumors of He’s disappearance were reported by Chinese tabloids Apple Dailyand Hong Kong’s Ming Pao newspaper over the weekend. They claimed He was placed under “house arrest” by his former employer, the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTC) in Shenzhen where the associate professor has been on unpaid leave since February 2018.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

The Impact of Chinese Espionage on the United States

In my recent study at Penn State University, I analyzed 274 cases of Chinese espionage. Several high-level conclusions can be drawn from those cases, which represent the last 20 years of Chinese espionage operations. Among the most important conclusions are the impacts on various components of U.S. national security.

China’s espionage operations have expanded dramatically, increasing in the number of operations, personnel, government, and state-owned enterprises, and foreign targets. There is also a national construct in place (however redundant) to ensure intelligence information objectives are satisfied by collecting foreign information and technology. These information objectives are tied to national defense and economic priorities. The only notable area in which China has shown minimal advancement has been in applying sophisticated espionage tradecraft. Lastly, China’s espionage activities continue unabated despite a large number of arrests, public exposure, and most recently, U.S. trade sanctions.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Exclusive: Sparkly, Opal-Filled Fossils Reveal New Dinosaur Species

In a dazzling discovery, fossils brought up from a mine in Wee Warra, near the Australian outback town of Lightning Ridge, belong to the newly named dinosaur species Weewarrasaurus pobeni. The animal, which was about the size of a Labrador retriever, walked on its hind legs and had both a beak and teeth for nibbling vegetation

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Muslim Cricket Star Usman Khawaja’s Brother is Arrested Over ‘ISIS Terror Hit List’ Found at a University — as Police Claim He Faked the Document to ‘Set Up Another Student After a Dispute Over a Girl’

Arsalan Khawaja, 39, the brother of cricket star Usman, was arrested by NSW Police on Tuesday morning in relation to a ‘terror hit list’ of alleged ISIS targets in Australia.

           — Hat tip: SS [Return to headlines]
 

The One Main Factor Driving Young Muslims Into Extremism is Revealed — and it’s Not Hardline Preachers or Mosques

Leila Alloush, CEO at the Victorian Arabic Social Services, has revealed the ‘number one’ factor driving young men to violent extremism.

           — Hat tip: SS [Return to headlines]
 

Australian Refugee Soccer Player is Arrested in Thailand Over Outstanding Vandalism Charges — and Now Faces Ten Years Behind Bars in His Home Country

Hakeem AlAraibi was detained at Bangkok Airport on November 27 on an Interpol red notice issued at the request of Bahrain, the country which he had fled.

           — Hat tip: SS [Return to headlines]
 

Could the Belgian Government Fall Over Dissent on the UN Migration Pact?

The possible acceptance of the UN Migration Pact has brought a crisis in the Belgian government. While Prime Minister Charles Michel wants to sign the document next week, the country’s largest party is opposed to it.

For Bart de Wever, the leader of the New-Flemish Alliance (N-VA) the UN Migration Pact is unacceptable, but the other government parties support it.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Democrat Rep. Pramila Jayapal: CEOs Must Get ‘Millions’ of Cheap Visa-Workers

Indian-born Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal says the U.S. economy needs millions of wage-cutting visa workers for good jobs sought by many Americans and immigrants.

The editors of the New York Review of Books published Jayapal’s corporatist demand for more visa workers on December 3 under the headline: “A New Moral Imagination on Immigration.” She wrote:…

Jayapal also urged that immigration policies should meet the needs of employers, not employees, writing that “our immigration system should be updated regularly to prioritize certain industries that are seeing rapid growth and need workers.”

Jayapal’s demand for more government-controlled foreign labor spotlights the growing corporatist alliance between elite progressives, establishment Democrats, CEOs, and Wall Street investors — and it helps to explain why ordinary Americans favored pro-American Donald Trump for the White House…

The Washington State representative’s plan to grow the economy with government-supplied labor mimics the elite-controlled 3,500-year-old caste system in her Indian homeland. Instead of recreating India’s caste system, however, the D.C. elite would provide lower-status visa workers and immigrants to elite investors who could then avoid paying higher wages to ordinary Americans. Jayapal’s plan would also prevent blue-collar Americans and legal immigrants from using labor shortages to raise their social status or to gain better working conditions or productivity-boosting machinery.

[Comment: Read it all. Democrat ranks are filled with people with similar views.]

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Here They Are, The National Petitions Against the UN Migration Pact — Did You Sign?

The UN Global Migration Pact is set to be signed in Marrakech on 11-12 of December. Several nations have chosen to withdraw from it to protect their countries. Please see the information below and sign the petition for your country.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Italy: Around 2,000 Migrants Expected to Leave Every Month Under Tougher Rules

Around 2,000 migrants are expected to leave Italy per month as humanitarian residency permits expire, following the passage of the migration and security decree drafted by populist Interior Minister Matteo Salvini.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

‘Migrant Free’ Slovakia is in Top Three of Safest EU Countries

In Slovakia, only 6.2 per cent of its citizens reported crime, violence or vandalism in 2017, according to data from the Eurostat statistics office survey which is part of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 16) strategy.

The safest countries in the European Union are in order:

Croatia, with only 3 per cent of Croatians reporting crime, violence or vandalism in 2017. Poland, having only 5.4 per cent and third, again, Slovakia, with 6.2 per cent.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Migrant Males Arrested at Two German Christmas Markets After Violence

Two German towns have seen arrests at their Christmas markets as migrants brawled with locals in one case and in another, a migrant threatened passers-by with an axe while yelling “Allah hu Akbar.”

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Nancy Pelosi Promises to Pass Illegal Alien Amnesty Via Dream Act

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) promised over the weekend to pass the Dream Act in the new Congress, which would provide amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.

Pelosi, who will likely become the next speaker of the House in January, said in a statement on Saturday that she will work to pass the Dream Act with her new House Democrat majority.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Refugee Beats Praying Priest to Death With Metal Cross in Germany

Lois Sindbad a 27-year-old asylum seeker from Cameroon admitted to killing the 54-year-old pastor Alain-Florent Gandoulou, who was from the Congo himself during prayer in Berlin on 22 February.

At first he beat the man with a metal cross and moved on to shove an umbrella down his throat. The victim died due to serious head trauma.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Seven Adult Migrants Suspected of Raping 10-Year-Old Finnish Girl

The police are investigating a serious sexual assault in Oulu of a child. So far, seven foreign men are suspected of seriously raping the young girl and serious child molestation.

The cruel rapes and assaults have been going on for months. According to the police, it is possible that there will be more suspects.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

#MeToo backfires: Wall Street’s New Rule is ‘Avoid Women at All Cost’

This is the ridiculous situation we now find ourselves in

No one could have predicted this!

From Bloomberg:

No more dinners with female colleagues. Don’t sit next to them on flights. Book hotel rooms on different floors. Avoid one-on-one meetings.

In fact, as a wealth adviser put it, just hiring a woman these days is “an unknown risk.” What if she took something he said the wrong way?

Across Wall Street, men are adopting controversial strategies for the #MeToo era and, in the process, making life even harder for women.

Just ignore the fact #MeToo made life infinitely harder for men…

There’s a danger, too, for companies that fail to squash the isolating backlash and don’t take steps to have top managers be open about the issue and make it safe for everyone to discuss it, said Stephen Zweig, an employment attorney with FordHarrison.

“If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment,” he said, “those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint.”

This is the ridiculous situation we now find ourselves in.

Being accused of sexual discrimination is nothing compared to being falsely accused of rape, so don’t expect this trend to reverse.

[Comment: lol … pause to catch breath … lol ]

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

Criminal Record for British Doctor Who Illegally Gave Sex Change Hormones to Kids

A GP who gave out sex-change hormones to children as young as 12 has been fined £14,000 after she was criminally convicted of running an illegal online gender clinic from her home in Wales.

           — Hat tip: Reader from Chicago [Return to headlines]
 

Hollywood Producer Ryan Murphy Launching Multi-Million Dollar Crusade to Defeat ‘Anti-LGBTQ’ GOP Lawmakers

Hollywood super-producer Ryan Murphy announced Sunday that he will launch a big-money organization aimed at defeating “anti-LGBTQ” Republican lawmakers.

In a speech at the 2018 TrevorLIVE Los Angeles gala, Ryan Murphy said the group will target 20 congressional candidates “who think they can get votes by hurting and discriminating against us.”

“I want these hateful and wrong politicians to go and to stop polluting our moral and ethical ether,” Murphy told attendees, who gathered at The Beverly Hilton for the event Sunday evening. “Based on this fall, I think it’s now possible to create a movement to protect and nourish our own.”

Murphy, the producer behind smash hit shows Glee and American Horror Story, signed a massive five-year deal with Netflix valued at $300 million in February. The 53-year-old is also executive producer of FX’s Pose, which boasts the largest-ever cast of transgender actors to appear regularly on the program.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

The War on Standards, STEM Edition

Heather Mac Donald has written and spoken extensively about how identity politics is hampering America’s ability to maintain its dominance in STEM fields. Our main competitors, most notably China, are focused on making sure the best scientists, mathematicians, and engineers are doing the work. They care nothing about gender. And they spend virtually every dollar related to STEM on hard research and analysis.

The U.S., by contrast, is preoccupied with the gender and (to a lesser extent) the race and ethnicity of who is in the lab. And we pour money into promoting identity politics in STEM.

Indeed, Elizabeth Harrington of the Washington Free Beacon reports that the National Science Foundation has spent over $62 million on “intersectionality” studies in the STEM fields “with the goal of transforming science labs into test tubes for identity politics.” She writes:

The government is spending millions applying the liberal academic theory, which views everything through the lens of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation to identify “systems of discrimination or disadvantage,” to science, technology, engineering, and math programs.

This is the handiwork of France A. Córdova, the National Science Foundation director, a female of hispanic origin. She was selected by former president Barack Obama and has led the agency since March 2014.

Under her direction, the rot has been spreading fast.[…]

[Read the rest. Juicy.]

           — Hat tip: Dora [Return to headlines]
 

Wall Street Execs Too Afraid to Hire Women in Wake of #MeToo: Report

Male executives on Wall Street are so spooked by the #MeToo movement that they’re avoiding women altogether, a Bloomberg report said Monday.

Interviews with more than 30 senior executives suggest that the #MeToo movement has led to “gender segregation” in the workplace, Bloomberg reported.

“It’s creating a sense of walking on eggshells,” one adviser told the publication.

Another said just hiring a woman these days can present “an unknown risk.”

“Women are grasping for ideas on how to deal with it, because it is affecting our careers,” said Karen Elinski, president of the Financial Women’s Association and a senior vice president at Wells Fargo & Co. “It’s a real loss.” […]

[RTWT]

[Return to headlines]
 

Microsoft is Building a Chromium-Powered Web Browser That Will Replace Edge on Windows 10

Microsoft is throwing in the towel with Edge and is building a new web browser for Windows 10, this time powered by Chromium.

Microsoft’s Edge web browser has seen little success since its debut on Windows 10 in 2015. Built from the ground up with a new rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, Microsoft Edge was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure, but it launched with a plethora of issues that resulted in users rejecting it early on. Edge has since struggled to gain traction, thanks to its continued instability and lack of mindshare, from users and web developers.

Because of this, I’m told that Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, which uses a similar rendering engine first popularized by Google’s Chrome browser known as Blink.

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

The Elite Are Creating an Authoritarian ‘Beast System’, and Those That Dissent Could Lose Everything

They are transforming the Internet into the greatest tool of surveillance that humanity has ever seen, and if we stay on the road that we are currently on it is only a matter of time until our society becomes a hellish dystopian nightmare. I wish that this was an exaggeration, but it isn’t. Over the past couple of decades, the Internet has completely changed the way that we all communicate with one another. At one time, all forms of mass communication were tightly controlled by the elite, but the Internet suddenly allowed us to communicate with one another on a massive scale without having to go through their gatekeepers. This radically altered the landscape, and at first the elite were unsure of how to respond to this growing threat. There was no way that they could roll back time to an era before the Internet was invented, and so they have decided to use it for their own insidious purposes instead.

Today, the Internet has become the centerpiece of their “Big Brother surveillance grid”, and they are gathering information on all of us on a scale that has never been seen before in all of human history. But of course it was never going to stop there. Over the past couple of years we have started to watch the elite use all of this information to punish those that are doing or saying things that they do not like.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this phenomenon is what is going on in China. The following comes from BuzzFeed…

Chinese journalist Liu Hu always knew he’d have trouble with the authorities; he had been exposing corruption and wrongdoing for years. He was used to being hassled with regular fines and forced apologies imposed by his authoritarian government. He nevertheless persisted in truth-telling.

One day in 2017, Hu logged onto a travel site, but couldn’t book a flight because the site said he was “not qualified.” Soon he discovered he was blocked from buying property, using the high-speed train network, or getting a loan. And there was nothing he could do about it. His rights to essential goods and services were now circumscribed through an algorithm designed to discriminate against the 7.5 million people on China’s “Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement” list.

In China they call it a “social credit score”, but in reality it is nightmarish authoritarianism at its worst.

They are monitoring all that their citizens do and think — their political opinions, their shopping patterns, their travel history, their Internet behavior, etc. — and if they upset “the Beast system” then they could ultimately lose access to everything.

Put yourself in their shoes for a moment.

Just imagine a world in which you will no longer be able to buy, sell, open a bank account, get a loan, use public transportation or get a job.

Chinese authorities are even putting up surveillance cameras in the schools so that they can constantly monitor students…

[Comment: China is the Democrat plan for the USA.]

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

What Makes BeOs and Haiku Unique

The first area to take a look at is Haiku’s latest feature in its Beta release: packaging. Packages (but not just packages!)

Reading just ‘packages’ might evoke merely running a package manager on Gnu/Linux, etc. and while Haiku can do that, it’s far more.

As I mentioned in the Haiku Beta review, it was the first official release to feature package management. Best I can give anyone new to Haiku a mental picture of it is this: think of PackageFS of being like (but not the same as) having the old Slax 6 modules system running, along with all the usual ‘package’ tools to go with it.

A recap of it can be summarized in five quick points (versatile command-line packaging tools (as you might expect), the HaikuDepot and software updater, package and/or system states, the PackageFS, (where all packages are mounted seamlessly and mesh at startup), and as a side effect of the FS, a gentle layer of safety to the system.)

A quick overview of these features can be seen like this:…

Icon-o-Matic: Art in the making

As you may have noticed from the BeOS screenshot, icons in the BeOS were made out of traditional bitmaps. With the advent of Haiku, that’s all changed, and all iconography is done in a new Haiku vector icon format or .hvif.

This means that icons can scale gracefully in a very efficient, lossless, lightweight vector format. While the icons below scale up to 128×128, we could in theory go much higher. This is because like SVG, we are using paths and attributes or properties to define our elements, from the house, to the system leaf, to the shadows and folder surfaces, etc. over having a traditional raster icon design. In a simple sentence, they convey more while, on average, weighing less than the raster files they replace.

[Comment: Detailed review of the latest version of Haiku (successor to BeOS) ]

           — Hat tip: JD [Return to headlines]
 

12 thoughts on “Gates of Vienna News Feed 12/4/2018

  1. Rather, in the USSR, Christmas / New Year was made a pagan holiday.

    Grandfather Moroz added a granddaughter with the pagan name Snegurochka (Snow Maiden).
    Taking this character from the play of Ostrovsky.
    Also part of the New Year’s performances has always been a negative female character witch Baba Yaga and other representatives of Russian pagan mythology.

    In childhood I liked these holidays and performances in our garrison officers’ house.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2TYDCSsKsI

  2. “‘Migrant Free’ Slovakia is in Top Three of Safest EU Countries” lol this doesn’t sound right at all. Not only because it just doesn’t make sense if you know the reality of that country, but especially because they don’t even make the Top 10 of safest countries worldwide, while other five EU countries do (and it’s none of the three mentioned in the article). I highly doubt they moved up 16 or so spots in just six months.

  3. UK Government Humiliated Over Brexit Legal Advice
    UK Govt Forced to Publish Full Brexit Legal Documents After Losing Key Vote
    UK: “The Worst Deal in History”: Theresa May’s Surrender

    To Brexit or not to Brexit, that is the question:
    The European elites, particularly the German and the French variety, carry within their genes an acute strain of Compulsive Obsessive Disorder, a neurotic determination to endlessly repeat the past hoping for a different result – (Einstein’s definition of insanity*).

    Now, the British Parliament under the ‘leadership’ of two paranoid schizophrenics, or deluded compulsive liars if you will, May and Corbyn, and their cohorts, is close to aiding and abetting this descent into darkness, tyranny and bloodshed by tying themselves and we the people irrevocably to the abomination that is the EU, a behemoth which arose to power by pure bureaucratic mendacity, unrelieved autocracy, endless expansionism and taxation without representation, all without a single popular vote.

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel, child of the Stasi, remarked recently, “Countries must give up their sovereignty and join the one-world government,”. This is but an attempt at creating another Greater German Reich stretching from the Atlantic to the Russian border and perhaps beyond. They never learn, and Macron, sock puppet of the International Banking Cartels who always profit so handsomely from the bloody efforts of those poor souls who fight their wars, has climbed onboard this latest Teutonic blitzkrieg with alacrity.

    The E.U. farce was forged, beaten flat and polished under the heat of the disingenuous mantras of “peace,” “love,” and “money for all” – especially for illegal “refugees,” who are guaranteed to vote socialist because they are controlled by Turkey’s Erdoğan and his German imams**. Jean-Claude Juncker, the soon to be recent president of the E.U., justified that Muslim hijra (conquest by migration) as a tool to divide and conquer indigenous Europeans. Today, Britain is the target of Europe’s lust for vainglory and power, but as soon as Britain surrenders on Brexit, Italy, Greece, Poland, Hungary and many others will be next.

    The biggest, most painful embarrassment is that we in the UK have allowed our own affluent elites to be massaged, masturbated and bought off by the Franco-German Axis. If, in the next few days they anchor us in any way shape or form to this monstrosity and we do not immediately bring them, the lot of them, the whole damned political ‘establishment’, the vacuous ‘Slebs’ and the Metropolitan Chatterati and Banksters to their comeuppance, no matter how ruthlessly and without mercy, then, simply put, we deserve to suffer, suffocate and slowly become extinct. Which we will if we do nothing except politely protest.

    Now that Justice’s Advocate General Manual Campos Sánchez-Bordona of the ECJ has announced that the UK can unilaterally withdraw its Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty notification we can but ‘Cry Havoc! and let slip the dogs of war.’

    The ballot box is no longer an answer. Think hard and dig deep, guys and gals.

    [1*. Albert Einstein: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” 2**. In the UK the Pakistani ones.]

    • Another thing I have a beef with this “one world government” stuff is what happens if such a government isn’t benign?.

      Where does one go then?

      Purely as an aside, why will Juncker soon be “recent”?

      Is he going to long-term residential rehab?

  4. re: labour shortage in Canada

    This is bogus. Agricultural production is obviously only greenhouse related in the winter and there are plenty of Mexican and Jamaicans already here who fill these jobs. Oil and gas industry is mainly an Alberta issue and the gas fields sent many of the lads back home to Ontario a year ago when the industry slowed down. Just a matter of calling them back in.

    Of course, we all know the real reason for this annual alert: businesses want more immigrant labour to work ‘under the table’ for low wages and no labour law protections. Justine Trudeau wants to use this news to justify allowing more immigrants in; not to work, but to sponge.

    “What I hear across Quebec is entrepreneurs, businesses concerned about the labor shortage, so I’m not sure it’s the best time to cut immigration,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau commented.

    Bingo. that’s the real reason for ‘labour shortages’.

      • Forgive me if I seemed as though I were criticising the use or posting of the particular news feed item.

        I was actually shooting down the gov’t and the business organisation for their use of this game of employment numbers.

        • I never thought you were being critical. The news postings often deserve corrections from people who live there or who have more expertise. I don’t believe a thing Baby Doc says.

    • I grew up in an area with farms using the temporary foreign workers and the reasoning was Canadian kids were “too lazy” to get summer jobs but the reality was stories started going around about how Canadian youths were treated by these foreign workers and I have first hand experience with how they behaved when they came into town. My parents would never have let me work with them for my own safety. My friends whose parents still believed in the importance of farm jobs told stories of forming groups for protection and befriending one or two of the kinder workers to sit with them at lunch and walk them to their cars at night. But we are racist and lazy for not wanting to work with those who see us as another notch in the belt. Any girl over 10 was fair game…in in the presence of parents.

  5. re: Chinese scientist missing

    “Right now nobody’s information is accurate, only the official channels are,” the spokesperson said.

    Wasn’t this a line from 1984?

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