EUROPE
1. Morocco uses migrants to get what it wants – Analysis
Mass arrivals in Ceuta show how Europe pays for border controls with money and power
When 6,000 people pushed off a Moroccan beachfront Monday, swam around two border walls and waded into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, the question was why Morocco’s normally aggressive border patrols had let them get that far.
The answer: It was a message. With Morocco, the European Union has made the same mistake it made with Turkey just five years ago. It has granted massive leverage to an unpredictable partner by striking a deal in which Morocco receives assistance in exchange for preventing refugees from traveling into Europe.
2. Sweden Goes From Being One Of The Safest Countries In Europe To The Second Most Dangerous
A new investigation finds that Sweden has gone from being one of the safest European countries 20 years ago in terms of gun crime to the second most dangerous.
The study, published by the country’s National Council on Crime Prevention (Brå), reveals that Sweden is the only country on the continent where shootings have increased substantially since the start of the century
After having been ranked 18th out of 22 countries for gun crime from 2000 to 2003, Sweden now ranks in second place, behind only Croatia.
Authorities appear to be baffled at the cause of the increase, blaming it on “illegal drugs trade, conflicts within organised crime networks, and low levels of trust in the police.”
In a country where criticizing mass immigration is basically a thought crime, no consideration is even afforded to the possibility that the large number of Muslim migrants the country has absorbed over the last two decades could be a factor.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/sweden-goes-being-one-safest-countries-europe-second-most-dangerous?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter
3. Germany will pay Namibia $1.3bn as it formally recognizes colonial-era genocide
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/28/africa/germany-recognizes-colonial-genocide-namibia-intl/index.html
4. Central and Eastern Europe Help Show the Path Forward
Poland, along with its fellow Visegrad Group member Central European nations of Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic—and perhaps also including nearby Austria—has emerged as a perhaps unlikely ground zero in the fight to save Western civilization from a debilitating and increasingly all-encompassing liberal decadence.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/27/central-and-eastern-europe-help-show-the-path-forward/
5. Switzerland ends talks toward sweeping new accords with EU
The Swiss government has pulled out of years-long negotiations with the European Union on a comprehensive package of bilateral accords
The Swiss government on Wednesday pulled out of years-long negotiations with the European Union on a comprehensive package of bilateral accords, after the two sides failed to reach agreement on the cross-border movement of jobseekers and other key issues, among them EU migrants.
[…] The negotiations largely stumbled over EU demands for its citizens to have full access to the Swiss labor market, including those seeking work. Switzerland had resisted such a move. Cassis said it could mark a “paradigm shift” which might result in non-Swiss citizens getting social security rights.
Over the years, the Swiss have demonstrated hot-and-cold attitudes about EU migrants, which has put pressure on top politicians in a country where a nationalist, populist party still holds the most seats in parliament.
Cassis said Switzerland hoped to remain a close partner of the 27-nation bloc, with which it has more than 100 bilateral treaties, but also suggested his country deserved respect it wasn’t getting from the EU.
CHINA/USA
6. China Reveals “God Of War” Stealth Bomber
The latest sign China continues to advance at full speed is the revelation of a new 5000-mile range stealth bomber capable of striking US military assets in the Pacific.
The latest edition of Chinese Modern Weaponry magazine revealed new computer-generated images of the country’s next-generation Xian H-20 strategic bomber.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-reveals-god-war-stealth-bomber?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter
BRAVE NEW WORLD
7. Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted Under The Government’s New Pre-Crime Program
Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
This particular precrime division will fall under the Department of Homeland Security, the agency notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/total-tyranny-well-all-be-targeted-under-governments-new-precrime-program?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter
8. Microsoft president: Orwell’s 1984 could happen in 2024
Life as depicted in George Orwell’s 1984 “could come to pass in 2024” if lawmakers don’t protect the public against artificial intelligence, Microsoft’s president has warned.
Speaking to BBC’s Panorama, Brad Smith said it will be “difficult to catch up” with the rapidly advancing technology.
“I’m constantly reminded of George Orwell’s lessons in his book 1984. You know the fundamental story…was about a government who could see everything that everyone did and hear everything that everyone said all the time.
“Well, that didn’t come to pass in 1984, but if we’re not careful that could come to pass in 2024.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57122120
9. Genetically engineered ‘Magneto’ protein remotely controls brain and behavior
“Badass” new method uses a magnetized protein to activate brain cells rapidly, reversibly, and non-invasively
COVID/PANDEMIC
10. Whistleblowers expose Facebook’s secret algorithm to suppress negative vaccine experiences
Facebook’s has a “Vaccine Hesitance Comment Demotion” system.
Two Facebook insiders have come forward to investigative reporting outlet Project Veritas with leaked internal documents that reveal Facebook has been testing a “Vaccine Hesitance Comment Demotion” system and suppressing both truthful news stories and personal testimony on the vaccine.
The leaked documents state that the goal of this Vaccine Hesitance Comment Demotion system is to “drastically reduce user exposure to vaccine hesitancy (VH) in comments” and reveal that the system is being run on 1.5% of Facebook and Instagram’s collective 3.8 billion worldwide users. They add that during this test phase, likes on these so-called vaccine hesitant comments have been reduced by 42.5% and that around 176,000 total likes have been removed.
According to one of the Facebook insiders, a Facebook data center technician, this system uses classifiers in its algorithm to secretly determine “vaccine hesitancy” and assign a score called the “VH Score” (“Vaccine Hesitance Score”) to content. If the algorithm can’t make a decision, human raters step in and decide whether content is “vaccine hesitant.” This VH score then determines whether content gets demoted.
Whistleblowers expose Facebook’s secret algorithm to suppress negative vaccine experiences
BATTLE OF IDEAS
11. International Capitalists: Useful Idiots, Practical Communists, or Both?
But why was this allowed? Because the only job of corporations is to deliver profits to their shareholders. That’s it. If we accept this premise as true, then why should we be surprised? If “American” international capitalists are not really subject to the nation-state or to the moral law and they can increase quarterly profits by bowing before or being taken over by communists, why wouldn’t they? Capitalism does not necessarily imply any moral or ethical law, which is its great strength but also its great weakness. The defenders of our pernicious capitalism love to insist on this principle. Why don’t we take them seriously?
https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/26/international-capitalists-useful-idiots-practical-communists-or-both/
PROSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS
12. “Tied Up and Tortured”: The Persecution of Christians, April 2021
- In a video released on April 17, Muslims connected to the Islamic State in Sinai executed 62-year-old Nabil Habashi Salama, a Christian. Salama appears on his knees in the video, with three men holding rifles standing behind him….
- “We should remember that Greece spent 400 years under Turkish Islamic rule and that the fight for freedom was bloody. With that in mind it is even more dramatic seeing these images of fighting age migrants desecrating Greek holy places and having no respect for the country they are allegedly seeking refuge in.” — Greek City Times, April 12, 2021.
- “[H]e was kept in at least three different police stations and illegal torture cells, where he was mentally and physically tortured to confess to the baseless accusation [of blasphemy]… [P]olice repeatedly threatened to kill him…. The police investigators…also tortured him into naming other members of the Bible study circle…” — Aneeqa Maria, Salamat Masih’s attorney, Morning Star News, April 29, 2021, Pakistan.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17394/persecution-of-christians-april