dumnezero

Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l32N-e0QPeI

This video is about how China uses fashion and its digital presence to exert influence globally and bypass diplomatic tensions

This documentary is some months old, but still relevant. Turn on the subtitles, the English ones are human made.

Ziarul de Gardă once again penetrated Ilan Shor’s network. For three months we have documented from the inside with the help of a hidden camera how money circulates and how people working for Ilan Shor are recruited and lured to serve Moscow. The stakes – hijacking the country’s European course by compromising the October 20 referendum and the organized vote for a Shor-backed candidate to be announced just one day before the elections.

For three months, an undercover ZdG reporter, acting under a false identity, attended events organized by Shor’s people: so-called protests before or after court hearings of Shor’s corrupt politicians, electoral meetings with one of Shor’s candidates, whom the oligarch’s people believe will be eliminated from the race, and even handed out leaflets with false information about the European Union and the Eurasian Union.

The Shor network opened an account for the ZdG reporter in a Russian state bank using personal data that does NOT exist in reality. With the help of ZdG’s technical team, an identity card with made-up data was “cloned”, and in September, after almost two months in the service of Shor and Moscow, the ZdG reporter received the promised “iablociki”, i.e. 15 thousand Russian roubles, equivalent to about 2.7 thousand MDL (140 Eur). After all, the reporter ended up with less money for her “work” after being charged several fees along the way, both by the banks involved in the transactions and by the individuals who coordinated it. In October, another 15 thousand Russian rubles were transferred to the same account. Throughout this period, the ZdG reporter received several phone calls “from Moscow” thanking her for her work.

The scheme operated even on the day when the police and prosecutor’s office announced that they had dismantled a national bribing network. They had discovered that around 130 thousand Moldovans had been bribed for their vote on October 20, however this scheme was still in effect after the law enforcement bodies had uncovered it.

Two years after the publication of the investigation “Protesters to rent”, in which we showed that the participants in the protests organized by the former “Shor” party were paid, ZdG has penetrated again into Ilan Shor’s network. We found a similar reality, where money dictates and fuels any protest movement and spirit. But the differences are at the level of organization and circulation of money.

Call it the real nuclear option for bringing Viktor Orbán’s Hungary to heel — but also call it a risky thought experiment. Tom Theuns of Leiden University wants to empower the EU to sever ties with a rogue member state like Hungary, where Orbán has fashioned an autocracy and set about cultivating the EU’s strategic rivals. Introducing an expulsion threat could push EU autocrats like Orbán to show more respect for rule of law and democracy, says Tom, while the current lack of any such mechanism has instead emboldened them. For now, Tom’s ideas still are legally theoretical, not to mention politically delicate. In his new book, Protecting Democracy in Europe, Tom envisages democratic states each leaving the EU and then immediately re-founding the Union — an EU 2.0 — minus any autocratic states. More than two dozen countries would need to coordinate national consents in advance, using the same EU treaty article that Britain used in Brexit. But if all doesn’t go to plan — think obdurate legislators, sudden calls for referendums, or a even French demand for more subsidies — the exercise could usher in the kind of political warfare that sinks the EU for good. Tom’s goal is, above all, to end what he calls fatalistic and defeatist thinking — that the EU must remain stuck in perpetuity with Orbán’s brand of kleptocratic illiberalism. “Supranational union with an autocratic state is a choice,” insists Tom. “EU member states can also choose to disengage.” In this episode Tom also reflects on what happened a quarter-century ago, when European authorities failed to block Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) from government, to elucidate a pattern of insufficient EU responses in the Hungarian context.

PSA: Simion is as good at lying as Trump is, and his party is full of grifters, scammers and profoundly ignorant fools.

The US wants central and eastern European countries to join its path of “energy freedom” instead of following the wider region’s transition to a net zero economy, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in Warsaw.

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“Central Europe faces a time for choosing,” Wright told conference participants. “We warmly welcome you to join us on Team Energy Freedom and Prosperity for Citizens.”

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“In fact, the clarion conclusion from economic studies of climate change is that net zero 2050 is absolutely the wrong goal,” he said. “Not only is it unachievable, but the blind pursuit of it will cause, is causing far more human damage than climate change itself.”

President Trump has repeatedly called on Europe to buy more American energy products if the bloc wants to avoid tariffs.

Extra context:

Climate Crisis Deniers Explain Why They Like U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright - DeSmog

Comic story by Eleri Harris

Contents

00:00 – Smokin’ hot Europeans

00:24 – State of the European Climate Report

01:15 - Headlines

02:27 – Extremes

04:16 – Polar impacts

07:50 – Global context

08:54 – Future change

10:02 - What to do

10:56 - Thanks

2024 was the world’s hottest year on record, and Europe is the continent warming the fastest. Extreme events ravaged Europe last year, including floods, wildfires and storms that claimed hundreds of lives and impacted many thousands more.

To find out more, I spoke to Julien Nicolas, a co-author of the European State of the Climate Report, a huge undertaking that was put together by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting on behalf of the Copernicus Climate Change Service and World Meteorological Organisation.

by Benn Jordan