Lebanon parliament elects Aoun as president, ending two years of deadlock
Press TV – January 9, 2025
Lebanese lawmakers have elected army chief Joseph Aoun as Lebanon’s new president, putting an end to a two-year-long political deadlock in the crises-hit Arab country.
Legislators on Thursday chose Aoun after two rounds of voting in the 128-member parliament of the small Mediterranean country, which has been without a president since the end of the tenure of former president Michel Aoun, who is not associated with the newly-elected president, in October 2022.
Political neophyte Aoun, 60, is widely regarded as the favored candidate of the United States and Saudi Arabia, on whose financial support Lebanon relies as it works to recover from a 14-month bombardment by Israel mostly against the Arab country’s southern parts where the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement is based.
Hezbollah, which had exchanged daily fire with the occupying regime from October 2023 until a ceasefire in November, had previously supported Suleiman Frangieh, the leader of a small Christian party in northern Lebanon, as its preferred candidate.
However, Frangieh announced his withdrawal from the race on Wednesday and threw his support behind Aoun, seemingly paving the way for the army commander.
Aoun secured 99 out of 128 votes in Lebanon’s deeply divided parliament, with support from across the political spectrum, including Hezbollah legislators and their rivals. His election ended a prolonged leadership vacuum that had stalled key reforms and heightened fears of a broader collapse amid the nation’s multiple crises.
Following his election as president on Thursday, Aoun, who had served as the 14th Commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces since 2017, formally stepped down from his military role. He entered parliament to take the oath of office dressed in civilian attire.
Aoun will need to oversee the implementation of the US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon while also establishing a new government capable of addressing postwar reconstruction.
In November, the World Bank provided a preliminary assessment estimating the war’s physical damage and economic losses at $8.5 billion.
However, any rebuilding efforts will be hindered by Lebanon’s severe economic crisis, a five-year downturn that commenced with a liquidity crisis in Lebanese banks. Since then, the country’s GDP has contracted by over a third.
Before Thursday’s parliamentary sessions, 12 attempts to elect a president had failed over the past two years.
Since October 2022, the small Mediterranean country has been functioning without a formal government, which has worsened a financial crisis that prompted Lebanon to default on $30 billion in Eurobond debt some five years ago.
Lebanon’s divided sectarian power-sharing system is often susceptible to deadlock due to both political and procedural challenges. The country, which is currently struggling with its crises, has experienced multiple prolonged presidential vacancies, including the longest one, which lasted nearly two and a half years from May 2014 to October 2016, ending with the election of former President Aoun.
150 EU officials expected to monitor Elon Musk conversation with Alice Weidel, possible ban on the table
Remix News | January 9, 2025
The European Union’s outrage is only growing over a planned interview hosted by Elon Musk later today with Alternative for Germany (AfD) party co-chair Alice Weidel. Now, Politico is reporting that 150 EU officials are expected to attend the conversation between Musk and Weidel for the purpose of learning whether X is complying with EU rules. In addition, French politicians are already talking about an EU-wide ban.
The claim is that there are fears that Musk’s team will manipulate the algorithm to provide the interview more attention. However, Musk has over 200 million followers and nearly all of his posts receive millions and often tens of millions of views, which makes it certain that the interview, which has also been widely advertised, will receive significant attention.
Weidel has also taken to X about the surveillance of the upcoming interview.
“Big Brother is watching you: 150 EU officials are supposed to monitor my conversation with @elonmusk. An EU that uses its bureaucracy to exercise censorship on social media is instilling the spirit of unfreedom. The #dsa threatens democracy!” she wrote
The officials overseeing the interview are “given relatively extensive power,” according to Politico. They will be able to use, among other things, the Digital Services Act (DSA) to monitor how the algorithm works and how content is being displayed to users.
Politico writes that Musk allegedly pushed certain posts in the past, including one about the Super Bowl in the past. The alleged reason was that Musk was mad that one of President Biden’s posts were getting more attention.
The EU officials are working with experts from the European Center for Algorithmic Transparency” in Seville to determine if such an action will occur once again. However, they will not release this information immediately. Instead, it will like be added to a general procedure against X.
A wide range of EU leaders fear losing power due to shifting public sentiment, and Musk’s X represents their top threat. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, on Wednesday, called for a decisive stand against political influence. When asked whether a ban on X, in the same style as Brazil, was possible, he responded: “That is possible under our laws.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez also claimed Musk was pushing “hate” and warned against the rise of fascism in Europe.
SPD General-Secretary Matthias Miersch said that Musk’s influence on Germany’s elections now “call into question the foundations of democracy.”
However, Musk is unlikely to manipulate the algorithm in favor of Weidel especially when enough people are already likely to watch the interview without any interference. Absent some overt manipulation, it is unclear what could possibly be illegal about such an interview. Musk is allowed to interview Weidel. That is his right and her right. The bigger problem would be if he censored anyone who criticized such an interview or manipulated the algorithm to suppress this criticism, which is undoubtedly what the old Twitter regime did before his purchase — all of which the EU actively supported
The head of Germany’s Federal Network Agency, Klaus Müller, appeared to take a more measured approach to the issue.
“Not everything that you get upset about is also illegal,” said Müller on Thursday morning on Deutschlandfunk. “In election campaigns, you also have to put up with things that you personally find inappropriate, indecent or unacceptable.” Freedom of expression always means “the freedom of those whose opinion you do not share.”
He said that the excitement over the Musk interview was “understandable” but it must first be observed whether any laws are actually broken during the process. He noted, however, that people could choose simply not to listen to the interview.
Pro-Western Georgian ex-president appointed to US fellowship
RT | January 9, 2025
Former Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili has become a fellow at the McCain Institute at Arizona State University, the US academic institution has said. Georgia’s parliament speaker has slammed the appointment, asserting she is going back to “the entity that employed her.”
Zourabichvili, who was born in France and maintained a pro-Western stance during her term, has been chosen for the 2025 Kissinger Fellowship, named after former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the McCain Institute announced in a statement on Monday.
Commenting on the offer earlier this week, the speaker of the Georgian Parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, drew parallels between Zourabichvili’s appointment and former President Mikhail Saakashvili’s past academic tenure abroad.
“Almost 12 years ago, a similar gesture was extended to … Saakashvili, at Tufts University,” he wrote on X on Tuesday. “Despite having pledged allegiance to Georgia alone, Saakashvili later became a Ukrainian citizen and Zourabishvili too, eventually, is likely to return to her native France.”
Papuashvili concluded that neither had truly served Georgia, returning instead “to the entity that employed them.”
In December, Georgian MPs elected as president former Manchester City football player Mikhail Kavelashvili from the People’s Party, which together with the Georgian Dream form the ruling coalition.
However, Zourabichvili refused to recognize Kavelashvili as her successor, claiming that the parliamentary election in October that brought a convincing victory for Georgian Dream had been rigged.
Despite failing to provide any proof of fraud, the pro-Western opposition protested for weeks after the vote, demanding a rerun of the election. They were fully backed by Zourabichvili, who herself appeared among the demonstrators. The 72-year-old also threatened to not leave the presidential palace in Tbilisi, but eventually departed in late December.
Georgia is a parliamentary republic in which the prime minister and government wield executive power, while the president’s position is ceremonial.
The McCain Institute said that during her presidency between 2018 and 2024 Zourabichvili “forcefully defended Georgia’s path to EU and NATO integration and supported democratic reform, famously vetoing the Georgian Dream government’s Kremlin-modeled ‘foreign agent law’ and standing against the party’s autocratic turn.”
In her new role, the former Georgian president “will use her vast diplomatic, leadership, and policymaking experience to push for new elections and a democratic path forward in her country,” it said.
In May, the parliament in Tbilisi overturned Zourabichvili’s veto and adopted legislation that required NGOs, media outlets and individuals that get more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as foreign agents and disclose their donors.
The Georgian political opposition strongly criticized the bill, labeling it a “Russian law” and accusing the ruling party of basing it on legislation enacted in Russia in 2012. The ruling party, meanwhile, maintained that the law was inspired by the US Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, emphasizing that the Georgian version is actually far more lenient than its American counterpart.
Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said last month that the law had helped to avert a coup that had been planned in Georgia with the use of “foreign funding.”
Ukraine offers to replace Hungary in EU
RT | January 9, 2025
Ukraine is ready to take Hungary’s place in the European Union, the Foreign Ministry in Kiev said on Wednesday. Budapest recently blasted Ukraine for blocking the transit of natural gas from Russia to the European Union.
Earlier this week, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto accused Kiev of creating “artificially reduced supply,” emphasizing that its unilateral decision to stop the transit of Russian gas, coupled with EU sanctions, had sent prices soaring.
“If the Hungarian side prioritizes strengthening of Russia instead of the EU and the US, it should openly admit it,” the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “Ukraine will be ready to fill any vacant seat in the EU and NATO, if Hungary decides to vacate it in favor of membership in the CIS or the CSTO.”
The CIS, short for the Commonwealth of Independent States, is a bloc uniting several post-Soviet countries. The CSTO, or Collective Security Treaty Organization, is a military alliance that currently includes Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Ukraine chose not to prolong a five-year transit contract with Russia’s Gazprom at the end of 2024, cutting off several EU member states from Russian gas supplies, including Romania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Italy, and Moldova. The halt immediately sent prices in the region soaring to more than €50 per megawatt hour, a level unseen since October 2023.
Hungary’s Szijjarto stated that the higher prices undermine the EU’s competitiveness and disproportionately burden citizens of the bloc. The minister further alleged that Ukraine had breached its EU Association Agreement by halting transit shipments.
Kiev’s decision has also been slammed by Slovakia, which relies on Russian pipelines for about 60% of its energy needs. Last week, Slovak Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok characterized the move as a “betrayal of trust” and a threat to energy stability in the region.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said earlier this month that the US was the only beneficiary of the situation, charging that Washington is the “main sponsor of the Ukrainian crisis.”
Moscow was willing to prolong the transit contract and maintain gas shipments through Ukrainian territory beyond 2024. President Vladimir Putin accused Kiev of “punishing” EU member states with its decision, predicting that it would result in higher energy prices. During his annual press conference on December 19, he said the halt would have minimal impact on Russia, however.
Hungarian news portal calls Biden’s decision to sanction minister ‘a slap in the face’
Remix News | January 9, 2025
In the wake of the United States sanctioning Antal Rogán, the minister in charge of Prime Minister Orbán’s cabinet office, the Mandiner news portal assesses the case as highly unusual.
The official statement from the U.S. Treasury Department quotes Bradley T. Smith, the Treasury Department’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, as saying: “The United States will not hesitate to hold accountable individuals, like Rogan, who use the power of their office to illicitly enrich themselves and their cronies at the expense of their country and their fellow citizens.”
The justification does not contain specific cases, but writes about general corruption, referring to the 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index. This index was prepared by Transparency International (TI), which receives support from organizations affiliated with the United States Department of State and George Soros, among others.
The sanctions action taken by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) was based on Presidential Executive Order 13818, which implements the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.
The Magnitsky Act allows the United States to impose sanctions on individuals for either corruption or human rights abuses. As Human Rights First describes it, the U.S. Congress passed the original Magnitsky Act in 2012 in response to the death in custody of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax consultant who exposed a massive tax fraud scheme. The Magnitsky Act authorized the United States to impose sanctions on Russians involved in Magnitsky’s brutal detention and other human rights abuses against activists. Interestingly, the law does not define exactly what corruption means.
Between 2017 and 2023, the United States sanctioned 650 foreign individuals citing the law.
Even the soon-to-be-departing Pressman admitted that Antal Rogán’s sanctioning was unprecedented: “It is not common for the United States to designate a sitting minister. Even less common to do so in an Allied country.”
How unprecedented the case is, is well illustrated by the company in which the Biden administration placed the Hungarian minister.
People are usually put on the sanctions list for very serious reasons. Former Afghan parliamentarian Ajmal Rahmani, for example, was sanctioned in 2023 for allegedly mismanaging U.S. government aid intended for the reconstruction of his war-torn country and then building an extensive business and real estate empire in Germany and Dubai.
Under the Trump administration, a European politician was sanctioned as well. In December 2019, the U.S. government sanctioned Latvian politician Aivars Lembergs for money laundering, embezzlement, bribery, and abuse of office. Four entities owned or controlled by Lembergs were also designated, including the Ventspils Freeport Authority, which operated a major international port.
In 2021, the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act against three Bulgarian individuals: former parliamentarian Delyan Peevski, prominent businessman Vasil Bozhkov, and former national security official Ilko Zhelyazkov. In addition, 64 entities allegedly associated with them were also sanctioned, Radio Free Europe reported.
Each of the cases mentioned above clearly shows that usually when someone is put on a sanctions list for corruption, their accomplices are also sanctioned, as well as the companies involved.
The Biden administration has a history of using the Justice Department and Democratic prosecutors against its own political opponents, so it is not surprising that it is using sanctions against the Hungarian government. The timing of the sanctions is also telling, as Joe Biden’s government will leave in two weeks, so this decision can be interpreted as a diplomatic slap in the face.
UK special forces had ‘golden pass’ to get away with murder – officer
RT | January 8, 2025
British SAS operatives were given a “golden pass allowing them to get away with murder” in Afghanistan, a former UK Special Forces officer has told a government inquest. Other witnesses described routine executions of unarmed civilians by British forces.
The officer’s statement was given behind closed doors to the UK’s Independent Inquiry Relating to Afghanistan earlier this year, and included in a trove of documents published by the inquiry on Tuesday.
The former officer raised concerns about the killing of unarmed civilians in 2011, claiming that the SAS was covering these crimes up. The officer said that higher-ups within UK Special Forces – which comprises the Special Air Service (SAS), the Special Boat Service (SBS), and four other clandestine branches of the British military – had no interest in investigating the killings, and that SAS operatives had essentially been handed a “golden pass allowing them to get away with murder.”
The Afghanistan Inquiry is probing night raids carried out by British special forces between 2010 and 2013, when the alleged killings took place.
A junior officer told the inquest that “all fighting age males” were killed in these raids, regardless of whether they were armed or not. SAS personnel sometimes carried weapons to drop beside dead bodies after the killings in order to make them appear as combatants.
Prisoners were sometimes executed after they had been restrained, the witness recounted. “In one case, it was mentioned a pillow was put over the head of an individual before being killed with a pistol,” the document noted.
The inquiry is investigating the killings of at least 80 prisoners.
”I suppose what shocked me most wasn’t the execution of potential members of the Taliban, which was of course wrong and illegal, but it was more the age and the methods and, you know, the details of things like pillows,” the officer said, noting that some of the victims were “100%” aged 16 or younger.
The officer said that he was afraid for his own safety after testifying.
”Basically, there appears to be a culture there of ‘shut up, don’t question’,” another officer told the inquiry.
Claims of war crimes committed by British special forces in Afghanistan have surfaced before, with BBC Panorama, the Sunday Times, and other outlets claiming that civilians were routinely killed on night raids. In one case, the American military reportedly had video footage of one massacre, but mysteriously lost the footage when pressed by a British court.
Late last year, the BBC reported that one of the UK’s most senior generals had withheld from the latest inquiry evidence of soldiers executing handcuffed detainees in Afghanistan.
Operation Choke Point 2.0 (2023)
Corbett | January 7, 2025
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From 2013: The specter of Operation Choke Point 2.0 has just been raised in a recent House Financial Services Committee meeting. But what was Operation Choke Point 1.0? And why should we be concerned about this latest attempt to debank “disfavoured individuals,” anyway? Find out all the details in this week’s edition of The Corbett Report podcast.
FLASHBACK SHOW NOTES:
Operation Choke Point 2.0: How the Feds Are Seeking to ‘Debank’ Targeted Industries
What is Operation Choke Point 2.0? Trump vows to end it
Proof of Operation Chokepoint 2.0
Choke Point: How the Government Will Control the Cashless Economy
Episode 440 – Operation Choke Point 2.0
PODCAST SHOW NOTES:
Watch: Federal Reserve head is questioned on controversial “debanking of disfavored individuals”
Choke Point: How the Government Will Control the Cashless Economy
Episode 394 – Solutions: Survival Currency
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Banks have started to freeze accounts linked to the protests, Freeland says
Operation Choke Point 2.0 Is Underway, And Crypto Is In Its Crosshairs
Federal Reserve Says Custodia’s Plans Would Endanger Itself and the Crypto Industry
Episode 394 – Solutions: Survival Currency
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The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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