Reflectii

Following Mark Zuckerberg’s Op-Ed in Support of Regulation, Facebook Must Cease all Related Lobbying Work

Last weekend, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for governments and regulators to become involved in censoring harmful content online. However, Mr. Zuckerberg’s call was intentionally heavy on idealism and rhetoric, and light on specifics. Once more, the company’s PR strategy is carefully calibrated to give the public very little understanding of how Mr. Zuckerberg plans to support his words with action.

20 years have passed since NATO bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days. The air campaign with at least 900 bombing sorties again announced imperialist power – destroy everything to loot. It was an act of aggression against Yugoslavia, deny the country’s sovereignty and integrity, and violently carve away Kosovo for creating an imperialist enclave.

The expression “academic prostitution” appears abusive. It either conveys an apparently arbitrary disrespect to certain academics by comparing them to prostitutes, or conversely appears to equate sexual prostitution, – an honorable, if hazardous, occupation – with intellectual prostitution, a definitely dishonorable one.

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have signed a new Franco-German friendship treaty aimed at reinvigorating the European Union, which has been buffeted by the European debt crisis, mass migration and Brexit — as well as innumerable conflicting interests and priorities among its 28 member states.

As the resumption of the Brexit debate looms in the House of Commons, it is reported that the European Commission is haughtily retaining its refusal to consider any revision to the Withdrawal Agreement (WA); this attitude is also backed by the numerous leaders of European Union countries whom UK PM Theresa May has contacted. Those leaders assume that, like most of them themselves, the UK will eventually grovel before the Commission and accept its dictate.

July 1. Mubarek Ali, a 35-year-old former ringleader of a Telford child sex abuse gang, was sent back to prison after breaching the terms of his parole. In 2012, Ali was sentenced to 22 years in prison for child prostitution offenses, but was automatically released in 2017 after serving only five years. Telford MP Lucy Allan said there are “many questions to be answered” about why Ali was released, and also about how the justice system treats so-called grooming cases:

In April 2018, we warned that President Trump’s decision to withdraw US forces from Syria would be a repetition of President Obama’s worst mistake, the precipitate withdrawal from Iraq that facilitated the capture of Mosul by the Islamic State (ISIS).

We perceived that the immediate consequence of abandoning Syria would be a Turkish-led campaign to annihilate America’s Syrian Kurdish allies, who heroically bore the brunt of defeating the ISIS in Syria and capturing its capital, Raqqa.

It is a strange time to be a citizen in a Western democracy. Our society is based on exchange — we transact in the free market, we share ideas online, and most significantly we give up some of our natural liberty in exchange for a civil society and a vote.

But increasingly, the freedoms supposed to be protected by civil society are being eroded away. At the level of the individual, our freedom of speech is under attack. Criticism of migration is apparently about to become “hate speech” and a prosecutable offence.

Approximately 850 people from the UK have travelled to support or fight for jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq, say the British authorities.