At this point I really can’t understand what is driving Orban anymore.
If he stops stealing, his empire collapses, and he (or his family who are also involved) might even see some form of consequences. The EU does not let him steal any more, hence the openness to the East.
Oh, they definitely do, in their own way.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually don’t mind Russians being able to make a better life for themselves, I’m happy for them if they can leave and move and be happy.
It’s just that Russian spies have been moving openly in Budapest, several years ago there was this one guy who defaced a Soviet monument - that IMO has no place standing outside a museum, much less Freedom Square in Budapest. A random Chechen without ID or documentation or a reason for being in the country or Schengen appeared and coerced the guy to apologize publicly.
It’s a disgrace that an undocumented Russian citizen can appear in an EU country, brazenly commit a crime of coercion against an EU citizen while livestreaming it on Youtube, and the authorities of said country just stand by doing nothing and covering for him.
All I’m saying is that I have no illusions of the intentions of Hungary’s government in removing all visa restrictions, specifically and only for Russian and Belarusian citizens.
after its ant-migrant government
Lol, editing.
And just to be clear, the fine is not for denying asylum, but for not processing queries. No one is forcing Hungary to admit anyone, they just need to do their job and follow their own laws and reply to queries.
BTW, Hungary is currently importing a ton of immigrants from East Asia to break Hungarian unions, and also Russian and Chinese spies.
WHAT ABOUT
Visegrád don’t mean shit these days, the journalist is Polish, and worked with Radio Free Europe.
If anything, she’s Western-biased.
Well, the BBC headline avoids saying it was the Israelis killing her, they just say that the killing and the shots happened concurrently, but it fails to establish cause-effect.
Well, it still uses “fatally shot” instead of “killed”. And there is evidently no reason to do so, since they use “killed” in the article enough.
No, but governments with authoritarian tendencies, especially those with a nationalist streak, put a hard focus on international sports competitions as a matter of national pride. Starting with the Nazi German Olympics being the first televised event in human history, look at the Russian doping scandals, or how the Hungarian prime minister has a gigantic stadium in his tiny home village.
Competing in sports is okay. So is being an obsessed fan. When the government becomes an obsessed fan, that’s when the weirdness starts.
President Xi Jinping, reportedly a big football fan, once expressed his hopes to turn China into a “global football superpower”.
It is not okay to say this in an official capacity.
The problem is not that they use the passive voice, it’s that they use the passive voice systematically for one side and the active for the other. It’s always “Hamas kills” versus “shot dead by the IDF”, and usually the “by the IDF” part is buried in the article instead of the headline.
It’s fighting an uphill battle.
The US is doing everything it can to stonewall, and statements it made regarding it being dumbfounded that the ICC can also prosecute its allies, and that it’s not just a weapon to use against its enemies, reeks of colonialist hubris.
Is this “retaliation” since the ICC charged Israel? Didn’t they notice they also charged Hamas?
Also, is this going to be faster than the Trump prosecution?
Mulcaire said in his statement that Clearview doesn’t fall under EU data protection regulations.
“Clearview AI does not have a place of business in the Netherlands or the EU, it does not have any customers in the Netherlands or the EU, and does not undertake any activities that would otherwise mean it is subject to the GDPR,” he said.
It stole personal data of EU citizens, which is a crime in the EU and the US.
I guess that’s how they make a lot of money, selling their own Confluence plugin.
Brazil is well within its rights to sanction Starlink and prosecute people for evading said sanctions, and have people pay fines and go to prison for buying Starlink with Bitcoin.
Just like the US does with Iran and Cuba.
It couldn’t find the Polish national broadcaster either. It’s a tiny bit US centric.
I’m of two minds about this.
On the one hand, you have places like Hungary, where the government is blatantly abusing spyware like Pegasus against members of the media, civil activists, and members of the opposition. If you live in Hungary, and you are involved in any significant organizing, you will most likely notice your phone calls having a small lag as you talk to the other party. The mayor of Budapest had so many private conversations leaked (nothing earth-shattering, just stuff like politicking inside the opposition) that it’s a meme at this point.
On the other hand, we are in an information war with Russia and, to a lesser extent, China. Do we give up these tools, take the high road, and risk another fiasco like Brexit? Do we let German military intelligence tap Russian phones to help Ukrainians? Do we let the Bundespolizei or Europol do the same to suspected foreign drug or human traffickers? Do we let them do it to domestic ones? What if they are also politicians?
IMO it just needs to be transparent and auditable after the fact and have a very clear warrant process where dragnets and the like are explicitly disallowed, and all requests by the police to do this have to be public after the fact, while the military has to be explicitly disallowed from doing it to any EU citizen.
But I know what we’ll have is weird politicking around this, with VdL and her neolib ilk still trying to push that dragnet chat control nonsense over and over and over again.
The comments here are weird TBH. No, Brazil will not start shooting down satellites. It can just simply outlaw and sanction Starlink, stop anyone from paying Starlink for their internet subscription, and have peeps go around and confiscate ground stations.
Also, they can just go and ask the US to help enforce their ruling, telling them “do you want to be friends with us or Musky boi?”
This is why the ICJ cases matter.