Exclusive: Google Helped Israel Spread War Propaganda to 45 Million Europeans

Mint Press News | Aln Macleod

While it continues its conflict with its neighbors, Israel is fighting another war just as intensely, spending gigantic amounts of money bombarding Europe with messaging justifying their actions, and scaremongering Europeans that Iranian nuclear missiles will soon be turning their cities into rubble.

A MintPress study has found that, since it struck Iran on June 13, the Israeli Government Advertising Agency has paid for tens of millions of advertisements on YouTube alone. In clear breach of Google’s policies, these ads justify and lionize the attack as a necessary defense of Western civilization, and claim that Israel is carrying out “one of the largest humanitarian missions in the world” in Gaza.

The countries most targeted by this campaign include the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and Greece.

Information War

“A fanatical regime firing missiles at civilians, while racing towards nuclear weapons. While Iran deliberately targets cities, Israel acts with precision to dismantle this threat.” Thus starts one Israeli government ad that hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewers in Europe have been compelled to watch.

“Terror architects behind the elimination of Israel plan: eliminated. Israel targets only military and terror sites, not civilians. But the threat remains,” the voiceover continues, over ominous music and high-tech graphics. “We will finish the mission for our people, for humanity. Israel does what must be done,” it concludes. 

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A Bank With $49 Trillion In Derivatives Exposure Is Melting Down Before Our Eyes

Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse blog

Could it be possible that we are on the verge of the next “Lehman Brothers moment”?  

Deutsche Bank is the most important bank in all of Europe, it has 49 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives, and most of the largest “too big to fail banks” in the United States have very deep financial connections to the bank.  In other words, the global financial system simply cannot afford for Deutsche Bank to fail, and right now it is literally melting down right in front of our eyes.  For years I have been warning that this day would come, and even though it has been hit by scandal after scandal, somehow Deutsche Bank was able to survive until now.  But after what we have witnessed in recent days, many now believe that the end is near for Deutsche Bank.  On July 7th, they really shook up investors all over the globe when they laid off 18,000 employees and announced that they would be completely exiting their global equities trading business…

It takes a lot to rattle Wall Street.
But Deutsche Bank managed to. The beleaguered German giant announced on July 7 that it is laying off 18,000 employees—roughly one-fifth of its global workforce—and pursuing a vast restructuring plan that most notably includes shutting down its global equities trading business.
Though Deutsche’s Bloody Sunday seemed to come out of the blue, it’s actually the culmination of a years-long—some would say decades-long—descent into unprofitability and scandal for the bank, which in the early 1990s set out to make itself into a universal banking powerhouse to rival the behemoths of Wall Street.

These moves may delay Deutsche Bank’s inexorable march into oblivion, but not by much. 

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Money Laundering Scandals Bring Court Charges and Record Job Cuts to Euro Banks

Lubomir Tassev
Activist Post
 
The international financial establishment is known to express concern about the risks of money laundering when the crypto space is mentioned. A string of scandals indicates, however, that traditional banks are not only susceptible to the phenomenon but sometimes complicit, whether knowingly or inadvertently. New chapters have been added to the saga over the last few months that are hurting banks, bankers and their clients.

Deutsche Bank Prepares to Lay Off 20,000 Employees

 

Deutsche Bank, one of the biggest names associated with money laundering accusations, has been dogged by many problems during the past year. The leading German financial institution is now preparing for a major reorganization that may include the sacking of up to 20,000 employees, if the plan is approved at the end of this week.

The changes come after a failed merger with Germany’s Commerzbank a couple of months ago, which was eventually deemed too risky by the teams of both banks. It did not materialize, despite the support of the federal government in Berlin.

Many of the layoffs are expected to affect Deutsche Bank’s investment banking offices in London and New York. According to a BBC report, the German bank has 8,000 employees in the British capital. And the 20,000 jobs that are likely to be cut represent a fifth of the institution’s global staff.

Besides persistent problems with its investment business and unsatisfactory financial results, the banking giant has been suffering from its involvement in money laundering scandals. In November, 2018 its headquarters and other offices in Frankfurt were raided by law enforcement officers and representatives of the German tax authority.

During the operation, government agents, including prosecutors, were trying to establish whether Deutsche Bank employees assisted clients in setting up offshore accounts used to transfer illicit funds. The bank was connected to the big money laundering scandal at Danske Bank last year, which revealed that around €200 billion (around $230 billion) has flowed through its Estonian branch from suspicious accounts from the former Soviet space. 

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What Lauren Southern's Borderless Didn't Say

Red Ice TV

In Lauren Southern's film Borderless, she investigates what is happening with Europe's borders. The film claims to blow the European border crisis wide open, but there's some major aspects that weren't covered.

See: Borderless (2019)

Borderless (2019)

Lauren Southern 

Pre-order your DVD now packed with exclusive content! 

They may be able to take our videos off their websites... but purple haired Mandy from the "hate speech" review department at some big tech giant can't kick down your door and take your DVDs. (# NotallMandys # NotAllColoredHair) 

Let's try this again... 

After six months on the ground I'm thrilled to present #Borderless, the biggest & most comprehensive documentary ever made on the European border crisis. I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has made this possible & am so proud to release the movie totally free! It has been a long, painstaking journey and I truly believe now, we have created something incredible that will help shine a light on such an important issue. 

I want to make sure as many people are able to see this as possible, so again, we have made Borderless completely free to watch. Please share this important documentary with your friends, your family and coworkers - you might be surprised! 

If you enjoyed the movie and would like to tip the creators we would appreciate that as there was no profit made. We understand not everyone can afford to give so any support is appreciated even if you just give us a kind review or share the movie. :)

Website: https://laurensouthern.net 
Paypal: https://www.PayPal.Me/LaurenSouthern 
Bitcoin Wallet: 1JLM6GJwaPdNv4dM8K5KkcFHeziXXXMGKT  

Why Social Democracy Is Failing Europe

Alasdair Macleod 
The Mises Institute

There is a certain tension in the phrase, “social democracy,” and the description of someone as a social democrat. Social in this context is socialism by the state. A democrat supports the freedom for individual electors to express and defend personal interests in regular plebiscites. The two positions are incompatible.

At this point we should note that in economic terms there is little philosophical difference between European socialism and communism. Both seek to relieve capitalists of the means of production in favor of the state, either by ownership or control. Marx himself saw socialism as a temporary phase on the way to full communism. However, we all know from experience that communism fails by impoverishing everyone except a coterie of leaders. The same problem of the state’s inability to calculate prices, other than with reference to labor costs, and to foresee what consumers require on the morrow bedevils both socialism and communism. The principal difference between the two is the speed at which economic disintegration takes place, tied to the rate at which the socializing state removes personal freedoms and destroys wealth.

Social democrats assume that moderate socialism does not lead to those outcomes, which is a mistake1. They are deceived.

With social democracy we observe committed socialists and communists using democracy as the pathway towards increasing socialism and eventual communism. But there’s a problem, which in time becomes increasingly obvious to the electorate. Electors become poorer over time, and the more progressive among them seek to escape in order to participate in more capitalistic economies. Lenin and Mao Zedong dealt with this tendency by suppressing all freedom of expression and they redefined democracy to permit only the election of communist officials. Intellectuals, always the first to express discontent, were liquidated or sent to the Soviet gulags and China’s penal labor camps. 

In Western Europe a different, more patient approach was needed for the communist revolution. And this is where the concept of the social democrat springs from. 

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The Great Fraud of National Zionism

The Saker

[This article was written for the Unz Review] 

The Defining Event for the USA

 

There is no doubt that the 9/11 false flag (now even admitted (by direct implication) by NIST!) was a watershed, a seminal event in our history. While millions (or even billions) watched in horror as the twin towers burned, a small group of Mossad agents stood nearby and danced in overwhelming joy. Why exactly were these Israelis dancing? Surely there was more than just Schadenfreude in this spontaneous expression of euphoria?  Considering that these three dancing Israelis were just the tip of a much bigger iceberg, we can rest assured that there were many more folks dancing in joy that day, especially in Israel.

Why were these Mossad agents so blissful?  The answer is obvious: 9/11 put the following notions front and center of the concerns of most people in the USA:

• We are under attack and in grave, imminent, danger
• Islam wants to destroy our way of life
• Those who did 9/11 also want to destroy Israel
• We need to ask the Israelis to share their “expertise” in dealing with Islamic terrorism
• Draconian laws and new police powers need to be passed to protect us from mass murder
• If you are not with us, then you are with the terrorists

Almost a decade before 9/11, in 1992, Francis Fukuyama had explained to us that history itself was coming to an end while Samuel P. Huntington explained to us in 1996 that we were witnessing a “clash of civilizations.” This kind of “scholarly” research created the perfect political background to an already rather disquieting perception of the upcoming Year 2000. In 2001, when all hell broke loose, the general public was already well prepared for it (just like the AngloZionist elites who had already prepared the huge “Patriot Act” long before the Twin Towers came down).

9/11 was as much the culmination of a significant preparatory effort as it was the trigger for a decade or more of wars.

Still, all this immense effort into shaping the West’s perceptions was not good enough to hammer the sufficiently hysterical mindset into most people, in spite of the best efforts of the legacy Ziomedia to explain to us that Bin Laden decided that “we” were next in line for some kind of horrible (possibly nuclear) terrorist attack. Inside the USA the constant fear-mongering of the legacy Ziomedia did induce the suitable hysterical panic, while in the rest of the world things were not going quite as well. Especially not in Europe (which was vitally needed as a fig-leaf to pretend like the GWOT was not a US-Israeli thingie, but that there was a large “coalition of the willing” formed of the best and brightest countries out there). Something else, bigger and better, was needed and, sure enough, it was found: a mass exodus of poorly educated immigrants, the vast majority of them from Muslim countries.

While the (totally fictional and therefore totally unsuccessful) GWOT was petering out, the AngloZionists directed their stare at Libya and its leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi had warned that unless Europe was willing to pay Libya to contain the many millions of African refugees, a major catastrophe would happen. He explained that “Tomorrow Europe might no longer be European, and even black, as there are millions who want to come in“, “we don’t know what will happen, what will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans” and “we don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.”

The AngloZionists heard his message loud and clear and proceeded to immediately (and illegally!) overthrow and brutally murder Gaddafi (it is still unclear how many Israelis were dancing the day Col. Gaddafi was murdered).  Almost exactly a decade after 9/11 the Zionists finally had their “catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor,” but this time the victim was the entire European continent.

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Blackmail, Balderdash and the Brexit that Wasn’t

Tom Luongo

After a lot of drama, British Prime Minister Theresa May came back from Brussels with a breakthrough on Brexit.

Only it wasn’t. 

While the changes to the protocol that governs the implementation of the Irish Backstop are an improvement they are far fro enough to allay the rightful fears of Brexiteers and the Northern Irish.

From the beginning of this process, the EU has been in blackmail mode. They’ve made it clear that they would not negotiate in good faith or even at all. That much has been clear. 

The biggest question has been whether May herself was working in the British people’s best interest or was she simply a stalking horse for further EU integration of the entire continent of Europe.

Never forget that the EU has imperial ambitions. Those that have been its architects saw it as regaining the mantle of the center of the world as the U.S. bankrupts itself maintaining an empire around the world, fighting against the rise of Russia and China.

It sits in the weeds, making byzantine bureaucratic law and building both a fiscal and political union through these under-handed back doors.

And the people of Europe have woken up to it. The Brits voted to leave the EU because of this. 

Euroskeptic parties are rising across Europe. The latest rebuke of the EU came in Austria’s Salzburg, a traditional center-left stronghold just voted for a Lega-style nationalist/populist majority.

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Germany's failure to investigate allowed thousands of war criminals to gain asylum

Sputnik

About 900,000 migrants arrived in Germany between 2015 and 2016, most of them from war-torn countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan; since then, however, their number has shrunk significantly.

At the height of the migration crisis, German authorities failed to investigate thousands of pieces of evidence suggesting that war criminals were seeking asylum in the country, Bild reports.

The newspaper cited a parliamentary probe by Germany's Free Democratic Party (FDP) as saying that although the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees submitted about 5,000 cases of "crimes under international law" to the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Attorney General between 2014 and the beginning of 2019, only 129 such crimes were investigated. In particular, almost 3,800 referrals were made between 2015 and 2016, but just 28 were further probed.

Speaking to Bild earlier this week, a German Interior Ministry spokesperson said that the "large number of referrals prevented immediate investigation of each case".

The FDP's Linda Teuteberg, a member of the parliamentary committee for internal affairs, for her part warned against war criminals being afforded protection in Germany. "I have doubts as to whether the federal government has always pursued this in the past few years with due seriousness", Teuteberg pointed out.

Germany became one of the countries most affected by the migration crisis in Europe, which broke out in 2015 with a huge influx of people fleeing armed conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa.

In line with Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door policy, nearly 900,000 migrants were allowed to enter the country between 2015 and 2016, a number that has substantially shrunk since then and was far below the 220,000 projected in 2018. 

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Being European vs Being an EU Citizen

 Computing Forever

France and Germany just cut a deal to save the EU's #CopyrightDirective -- and made it much, much worse

Cory Doctorow
BoingBoing

The EU's on-again/off-again Copyright Directive keeps sinking under its own weight: on the one side, you have German politicians who felt that it was politically impossible to force every online platform to spend hundreds of millions of euros to buy copyright filters to prevent a user from infringing copyright, even for an instant, and so proposed tiny, largely cosmetic changes to keep German small businesses happy; on the other side, you have French politicians who understand that the CEOs of multinational entertainment companies won't stand for any compromise, or even the appearance of compromise, and so the process fell apart. 

That is until Chancellor Merkel and President Macron sat down to broker a deal, in which Merkel caved on every single measure that even looked like it might protect small businesses, co-operatives, nonprofits, and individuals, ending up with a deal that guarantees that every existing small platform will be destroyed and no new ones can be started, leaving Europe in the hands of US Big Tech -- forever. 

Under the new deal, any platform where the public can communicate will have to buy copyright filters to intercept all public communications and compare them to a database of so-called "copyrighted works" (which anyone, anywhere, can add anything to), and then block anything that appears to be a match.
 
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Adapt 2030 Ice Age Report: Europe setting a super freeze trend - 3rd year in a row

Adapt 2030

Third year in a row of extreme snowfall events for Europe. Grand Solar Minimum intensification forecast these amplifications, and these are the totals for 2019, but the real extremes will show around 2020-2021.

Facing populist assault, global elites regroup in Davos

Associated Press

Britain's political system has been thrown into chaos as the country negotiates a messy divorce from the European Union. Under President Donald Trump, the United States is imposing trade sanctions on friend and foe alike, and the government is paralyzed by a partial shutdown over immigration policy that forced Trump and a high-level U.S. delegation to cancel the trip to Davos.

A year after getting a standing ovation from the elites at Davos, French President Emmanuel Macron is sinking in the polls as he contends with "yellow vest" protesters who have taken to the streets to call for higher wages and fairer pensions. Nationalist political movements are gaining strength across Europe.

And the economic backdrop is worrying: experts are downgrading their forecasts for global growth this year amid rising interest rates and tensions over trade. "Judging by the state of the world right now 10 years on from the financial crisis, and the dysfunctional state of global politics I would suggest that these annual events have achieved the sum total of diddly squat," said Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets UK.

The collective worries have sent a shudder through global financial markets: The Dow Jones industrial average is down nearly 9 percent from Oct. 3. David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, said the buckling market "represents a lot of anxiety that we're seeing from the corporate elite who meet at Davos."

How times have changed. For most of the past quarter century, the worldview symbolized by the World Economic Forum — of ever-freer world trade and closer ties between countries — had dominated. Then came a backlash from Americans and Europeans whose jobs were threatened by low-wage competition from countries like China and who felt alienated at home by wealth inequality and immigration.

In 2016, U.S. voters elected Trump, who advocated restricting immigration and scaling back free trade, and the British chose to leave the EU. "The winners from globalization have had the megaphone," said Paul Sheard, a senior fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard University's Kennedy School. "The losers have been somewhat silent, but now are starting to express themselves through the ballot box and through the political process."

The Davos confab has always been vulnerable to snark: hedge fund billionaires flying into Davos in fuel-guzzling private jets to discuss the threat of climate change; millionaire CEOs discussing inequality while downing cocktails; endless conversations between people who describe themselves as "thought leaders."

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Top 10 Reasons Not to Love NATO

Washington's Blog

The New York Times loves NATO, but should you?

Judging by comments in social media and the real world, millions of people in the United States have gone from having little or no opinion on NATO, or from opposing NATO as the world’s biggest military force responsible for disastrous wars in places like Afghanistan (for Democrats) or Libya (for Republicans), to believing NATO to be a tremendous force for good in the world.

I believe this notion to be propped up by a series of misconceptions that stand in dire need of correction.

[...]

 1. NATO is not a war-legalizing body, quite the opposite. NATO, like the United Nations, is an international institution that has something or other to do with war, but transferring the UN’s claimed authority to legalize a war to NATO has no support whatsoever in reality. The crime of attacking another nation maintains an absolutely unaltered legal status whether or not NATO is involved. Yet NATO is used within the U.S. and by other NATO members as cover to wage wars under the pretense that they are somehow more legal or acceptable. This misconception is not the only way in which NATO works against the rule of law. Placing a primarily-U.S. war under the banner of NATO also helps to prevent Congressional oversight of that war. Placing nuclear weapons in “non-nuclear” nations, in violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty, is also excused with the claim that the nations are NATO members (so what?). And NATO, of course, assigns nations the responsibility to go to war if other nations go to war — a responsibility that requires them to be prepared for war, with all the damage such preparation does.

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Coincidence? Strasbourg Christmas market shooter on run, city bans public demos, France on highest threat level (UPDATE)

"Isn't it odd that right after Macron gives some crumbs to the Yellow Vest's demands, a "terrorist attack" happens; in the home of the European Parliament, no less. Never waste a perfect opportunity to remind the people 'why they need us' (and centering the attack in the home of the EU Parliament should be a good signal to the rest of the EU who are thinking about joining the protests, for good measure)."

----------------------------------

Sott.net / The Guardian

France has upgraded its security threat level as hundreds of police hunted a gunman who shot three people dead and injured 12 others in a terror attack on Strasbourg's celebrated Christmas market on Tuesday evening.

Six hours after the gunman disappeared after firing at passers-by in the busy city centre, the interior minister, Christophe Castaner, said the government had raised the risk level to the highest category.

The move would strengthen border controls and bolster protection of Christmas markets and other events.

In a statement, Castaner said the gunman had opened fire in three different places in the city before engaging in firefights with patrolling soldiers.

"He fought twice with our security forces," Castaner said.

French media reported the man, who was injured in one of the exchanges, then jumped in a taxi and disappeared.


Comment: He fled in a taxi??

Police immediately cut off major roads in and out of the city and launched a massive operation involving 350 police gendarmes and soldiers, as well as helicopters, to find him. French security services said they had identified the gunman as a 29-year-old born in Strasbourg, known to police and also on the "Fiche S" list of potential security threats.

French media reported that gendarmes had attempted to arrest the man for a separate crime at his home in the Neudorf district of south-east Strasbourg earlier on Tuesday. The suspect was not home, but officers reportedly found grenades in his apartment.

Shortly before 8pm local time, the man, armed with an automatic rifle, walked over one of the city's many bridges around the Grand Île toward the Christmas market, which attracts millions of visitors every year. Witnesses said the man fired a first volley of rounds and then walked down the street before opening fire again.

Local resident Yoann Bazard said he heard "two or three shots" and screams; and when he went to his window he saw people running. "After that I closed the shutters. Then I heard more shots, closer this time. There were two or three episodes like that ... As it got close, it was really shocking. There were a lot of screams."

Freelance journalist Camille Belsoeur said he was at a friend's apartment in the city centre and at first mistook the gunfire for firecrackers. "We opened the window. I saw a soldier firing shots, about 12 to 15 shots," he said.

He said other soldiers yelled for people to stay indoors and shouted "Go home! Go home!" to those outside.

One of the dead was said to be a Thai tourist who was shot in the head outside a restaurant. Staff and diners tried to save him but were unsuccessful. Six of the injured were reported to be in a critical condition.

The anti-terrorist section of the Paris prosecutor's office declared the incident to be an act of terrorism and announced an inquiry had been opened into "murder and attempted murder in relation to a criminal enterprise".

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, immediately held a crisis meeting at the interior ministry in Paris.

The gunman reportedly shot at soldiers patrolling as part of the nationwide Operation Sentinelle, the French military operation introduced in the aftermath of terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January 2015, and was injured when they fired back.

Comment: So a known criminal with grenades in his apartment evaded arrest and was on the loose earlier in the day before the shooting, with police apparently actively looking for him before the attack. Were the Operation Sentinel soldiers aware of this? 

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Immigration, Crime and Propaganda

Pierre Lescaudron
Sott.net

In my previous article on the topic of immigration, I wrote that one of "the destructive consequences of non-integrated mass migration is a rise in crime".

Migration is the top concern for EU citizens

 

I naively thought the connection between migration and crime was obvious. However, after publishing the article, I researched the topic further and realized that, as usual, things are way more complex and interesting than it seems.

In the present article we will try to understand the connections, if any, between migration and crime. To do so, we will go through a series of charts, we will interpret them and, more importantly, we will see how those data are often cherry-picked and twisted to serve extremist ideological discourses.

First, let's have a look at how migration is perceived. In Europe, immigration has clearly become the most important source of concern among the average citizen. It is ranked higher than terrorism or unemployment.

Whether this concern is justified doesn't really matter at this point, because it reveals an important point: a majority of European people are really concerned about immigration into their countries, i.e. there is an emotional load. And we know that heightened emotional states constitute a very fertile ground for hystericization, black and white thinking and extremist ideologies.

Perceived effects of immigration

Negative Perception of Immigration in Europe

European people tend to associate immigration with negative effects like dilution of culture, rise in unemployment, misappropriation of social benefits and rise in crime.

Among those deleterious effects, it is actually crime that shows the strongest negative association with migration, as shown in the chart on the right.

Only 10% of EU citizens (purple ellipse) think migration has a positive effect on crime. This survey dates back to 2014, and the figure has probably deteriorated further since then.

The two previous charts only deal with public opinion. So are those opinions based on some hard evidence or are they just the result of propaganda, fear, prejudice, racism?
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Monty Python’s Cleese to leave UK due to British press - ranked bottom of EU trust league

Omar Baggili
RT

Actor and comedian John Cleese has declared he will leave the UK later this year due to the “lying and triviality” of the British press – ranked the least trustworthy among 33 European nations. 

Cleese appeared on BBC Newsnight on Tuesday to express his frustration at the current state of Britain. While exasperated at the level of debate on Brexit, he more pointedly stated that his “particular beef” was with the British press.

The 78 year old, a long-time Liberal Democrat supporter who voted leave in the 2016 EU Referendum, came armed with a clipboard and chart to highlight the research carried out by the EU each year on the trust level, in the printed media by its citizens.

The eccentric actor got BBC presenter Emily Maitlis to confirm that according to the extensive public opinion polling carried out by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the UK is ranked last out of 33 European countries on levels of trust in the press.

Cleese laughed when Maitlis suggested the statistics illustrated that the UK press was robust, adding: “Least trusted does not necessarily mean not true.”

Cleese, who has been a vocal supporter of electoral reform, advocating a move to proportional representation, as well as press reform, told the BBC that he was upping sticks to relocate to the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis in autumn later this year.

"It’s one of the nicest islands I’ve ever been on. The relationship between the races is absolutely superb. The people there are really kind,” he said of Nevis.


So has the UK got an issue with levels of public trust in the print press and the media more widely?

Based on the EBU’s latest 2018 report, which surveyed approximately 1,000 people aged 15 or over in 33 European nations in 2017, it would appear so.

As Cleese said, the UK is ranked 33rd out of 33 on public trust in the press. Almost two-thirds of British people surveyed “tend not to trust” their print media. Only 23% “tend to trust” and 4% “Don’t know” if they trust the British press - meaning the British public have a net trust level of -50 in the written press. 

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Can the EU become a partner for Russia?

The Saker
Vineyard of the Saker

[This analysis was written for the Unz Review]

The re-nomination (albeit somewhat reshuffled) of the “economic block” of the Medvedev government has elicited many explanations, some better than others.  Today I want to look at one specific hypothesis which can be summed up like this: Putin decided against purging the (unpopular) “economic block” from the Russian government because he wanted to present the EU with “known faces” and partners EU politicians would trust.  Right now, with Trump’s insane behavior openly alienating most European leaders, this is the perfect time to add a Russian “pull” to the US “push” and help bring the EU closer to Russia.  By re-appointing Russian “liberals” (that is a euphemism for WTO/WB/IMF/etc types) Putin made Russia look as attractive to the EU as possible.  In fact, the huge success of the Saint Petersburg summit and the Parliamentary Forum is proof that this strategy is working.

This hypothesis is predicated on one crucial assumption: that the EU, under the right conditions, could become a partner for Russia.

But is that assumption warranted?  I personally don’t believe that it is, and I will try to lay out the reasons for my skepticism:

First, there is no “EU”, at least not in political terms.  More crucially, there is no “EU foreign policy”.  Yes, there are EU member states, who have political leaders, there is a big business community in the EU and there are many EU organizations, but as such, the “EU” does not exist, especially not in terms of foreign policy.  The best proof of that is how clueless the so-called “EU” has been in the Ukraine, then with the anti-Russian sanctions, in dealing with an invasion of illegal immigrants, and now with Trump.  At best, the EU can be considered a US protectorate/colony, with some subjects “more equal than others” (say, the UK versus Greece).  Most (all?) EU member states are abjectly obedient to the USA, and this is no surprise considering that even the so-called “EU leader” or “EU heavyweight” – Germany – only has very limited sovereignty.  The EU leaders are nothing but a comprador elite which doesn’t give a damn about the opinions and interests of the people of Europe.  

The undeniable fact is that the so-called “EU foreign policy” has gone against the vital interests of the people of Europe for decades and that phenomenon is only getting worse.

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Ten Years On, Putin Told Them So

Finian Cunningham
ICH

You can hardly blame Russian President Vladimir Putin for enjoying a “told you so moment”. He lately reminded European leaders that their all-out spat with the United States is what happens when you are too deferential to American hegemonic ambitions.

This predicament is just what the Russian leader had warned against almost 10 years ago in a famous speech he delivered in Munich on growing global disorder.

Last week, during his nationally televised marathon Q and A with Russian citizens, Putin referred to the unprecedented trade tariffs that President Trump is slapping on European states.

Rightly, Putin said those penalties were effectively a form of economic sanctions imposed by Washington on its supposed allies.

Putin hinted that the Europeans were now getting a taste of the noxious medicine that has been doled out to Russia by Western powers which have inflicted sanctions on Moscow over dubious allegations concerning the nearly four-year-old Ukraine conflict.

The acrimonious fallout from Trump's de facto trade war with Europe, Canada and Japan was all-too apparent during the testy G7 summit held this weekend in Quebec.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau decried American "illegal" trade measures, while French President Emmanuel Macron jettisoned his earlier "bromance" with Trump to declare that the group of Western industrialized countries plus Japan may reformat as the "G6" without the US, in order to counteract Washington's "hegemony".

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Thousands of Albanian protesters demand resignation of PM Rama over alleged links to organized crime and trafficking

Frank Sellers
The Duran

 Thousands of protesters marched in the streets earlier to day demanding the resignation of Albania's Prime Minister, Edi Rama, over alleged links to organized crime.

Albania is a NATO member and is presently looking forward to upcoming talks on its next phase of European integration. The protests come about a month before talks are set to resume on that topic.

This isn't the first time Rama has fielded mass protests which seek his removal, last year saw multiple such events take place.

Additionally, Albania isn't alone in facing public wrath and demands for a new government, as some of its neighbors have also experienced the same, also on corruption and links to crime organizations.

Such allegations are feared as a possible roadblock in negotiations with the EU as Albania seeks membership.

Deutsche Welle reports:

Thousands of people have taken to the streets in Tirana, demanding Prime Minister Edi Rama step down from his post. Protesters accuse the government of having ties to organized crime and trafficking groups.

Angry protesters in the Albanian capital Tirana marched along the city's Martyrs of the Nation Boulevard on Saturday chanting "Rama go." Some hurled stones at the premier's office building and the interior ministry.

"Albanians are protesting against the government's ties to organized crime and trafficking, which is undermining the future of Albania and now European integration efforts," Democratic Party leader Lulzim Basha told The Associated Press.

Basha said that "hundreds of thousands" of people participated in the anti-government march, which lasted for two hours.

There were reports of clashes between police and protesters. Ardi Veliu, the national police chief, said 11 officers were wounded while trying to keep protesters away from government offices.

The opposition also accuses Interior Minister Fatmir Xhafaj of supporting his brother who turned himself in to Italian authorities to serve a 2002 drug trafficking sentence. Xhafaj denies these allegations.

"No politicians should be guaranteed impunity," Basha told the rally participants on Saturday.

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