How the West became East Germany

Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time… in the coming days the Guardian will be revealing the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as …

Psaki: deniers should be everywhere banned

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that the Biden administration believes social media users who spread COVID-19 misinformation should be banned from all platforms if one platform has given them the boot. Psaki had revealed the day before that White House staff were tracking dangerous coronavirus misinformation with help from the surgeon general’s …

Not changing lanes, a U-turn

Although officials still remain divided on whether the virus emerged from nature, passing from animals to humans, the acknowledgment marks a shift from the scorn that was heaped on former President Trump and a group of European scientists who first brought up the lab-leak theory during the height of the pandemic last year.

Dying alone rather than infecting others

JAKARTA — Indonesia has overtaken India as Asia’s new epicenter for the coronavirus pandemic, with daily infections exceeding 40,000 for two straight days and officials warning that the delta variant is spreading outside the most populous island of Java. Southeast Asia’s largest economy on Tuesday reported 47,899 new infections, a record high, up from 40,427 …

Was Jeffrey Epstein a Spy?

in the last 10 years of his life, Epstein bragged to various people, including journalists, that he was advising a whole assortment of foreign leaders who included Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Zayed, Mohammed Bin Salman, various African dictators, Israel, the British — and, of course, the Americans…. He also told several of the same people …

Merkel refuses to go with the Biden Nordstream 2 program

But on July 12 Merkel expressed doubt the upcoming talks with Biden would resolve the disagreement between Berlin and Washington over Nord Stream 2. … U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on June 23 reiterated warnings about Nord Stream 2 during meetings in Berlin with Merkel and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. Blinken said he and …

Skyrocketing prices a bonanza for OPEC

The price of oil surged to $75 a barrel the other day under President Joe Biden’s green energy policies. The price was as low as $35 a barrel under former President Donald Trump because he believed in American energy dominance (“Drill, baby, drill”). So, more oil meant lower prices at the pump. It was effectively …

‘Please loot carefully and responsibly’ says Zuma son

‘For the people that are protesting and looting, please do so carefully and please do so responsibly. Because you cannot hold people responsible for defending what they love,’ Zuma said. The 37-year-old, who has his own ambitions to run the country, said that ‘finger pointing’ was not going to help because the government must ‘feed …

Cuban messaging services cut off by regime

NetBlocks metrics show that communications platforms WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and as well as some Telegram servers are disrupted on government-owned ETECSA (Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba, S.A. / AS27725) including Cubacel, the cellular network operated by Cuba’s sole telecommunications company. Findings corroborate user reports of disruptions to the services.

There’s no money left to bail Communism out

Biden’s remarks disappoint leaders in Havana. Before Biden came to office, they hoped he would follow in President Barack Obama’s footsteps and thaw relations with the island, reversing Trump’s actions that tightened the Cold War-era U.S. embargo. On the campaign trail, Biden said he would reverse policies on Cuba that “have inflicted harm on the …