EU spied on Orban for years – former Slovak minister
RT | April 16, 2026
The EU spy campaign that helped bring down Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is a lesson to anyone who defies Brussels, former Slovak Interior Minister Vladimir Palko has warned. “What they did to Orban yesterday, they can do to you tomorrow,” he told the outlet Marker on Monday.
Orban’s Fidesz party suffered a landslide defeat to Peter Magyar’s Tisza on Sunday, with Tisza outperforming even the most one-sided polls to win a 54% to 38% over Fidesz. Magyar’s party now holds 137 of 199 seats in parliament, giving the incoming PM power to rewrite the country’s constitution as he – and his allies in Brussels – see fit.
That the EU wanted this result was obvious. Orban had been a thorn in Brussels’ side for 16 years and was an insurmountable obstacle to the bloc’s plans to approve a €90 billion loan package for Ukraine. Throughout the election, evidence of interference by the EU, Ukraine, and opposition-friendly Hungarian media trickled out of Budapest. With the election over, the full extent of the EU’s intelligence campaign against Orban – and its implications for populists across Europe – is slowly becoming apparent.
“The defeat of Viktor Orban after 16 years of rule is not surprising at all,” Palko told Marker. “However, the tragedy is what happened in the election campaign.”
The EU spied on Orban for years
“Orban and his foreign minister were wiretapped by European intelligence for six years,” he continued. “Not Russian, not American. The secret service provided the content of phone calls to some journalists from several EU member states, and the members of the EU establishment used the content against Orban. This was an intervention into Hungarian elections.”
Palko, who served as deputy director of Slovakia’s SIS intelligence agency in the 1990s and interior minister between 2002 and 2006, confirmed information that had already surfaced in the runup to the election: namely that opposition journalist Szabolcs Panyi gave Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto’s contact details to an unnamed EU intelligence agency, that then wiretapped Szijjarto and leaked details of six years’ worth of his calls with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov back to Panyi and other pro-opposition reporters. Panyi’s outlet, Direkt36, derives 80% of its project costs from the EU.
EU spies also fed the Hungarian and international media stories of Russian “election fixers” attempting to swing the election for Orban, and of plots by Russian military intelligence agents to stage an assassination attempt on Orban for publicity. The claims were unfounded, but were seized upon by Magyar, who worked chants of “Russians, go home!” into his campaign rallies.
The EU in turn used these reports to justify the activation of its ‘Rapid Response System’ (RRS): a suite of online censorship tools that allowed Brussels’ “fact checkers” to remove supposed “disinformation” from social media platforms in the runup to the vote. In every election in which it has been activated, the RRS “almost exclusively targeted” right-wing and populist candidates like Orban, the US House Judiciary Committee found in an investigation last year.
“Only one thing is shown from the recorded phone calls: The Hungarians were friendly towards the Russians,” Palko noted. “But this already is a mortal sin for the EU establishment. This is the new European Union that is coming.”
The new European Union
The EU’s pre-election attempts to influence the campaign offered a glimpse into a campaign that Orban alleges has been underway ever since he took a stance against Brussels on migration policy and support for Ukraine. However, Europe’s few populist leaders have largely stayed silent on the issue.
The Hungarian election ultimately came down to kitchen-table economic issues. Roads, healthcare, public safety, and public transport were the leading issues among voters in all 19 of Hungary’s counties, and the electorate chose Magyar’s promises of cash injections for underfunded public services over Orban’s geopolitics-heavy platform. Magyar will depend on the EU to fund his economic plan to the tune of €20 billion, and as such will be easily leveraged by Brussels, giving further incentive for the bloc to back his campaign.
Yet the role of EU intelligence in the result has been ignored, even by Orban’s ideological allies on the continent. This, Palko reckons, is a mistake. “All those who were not bothered by it should be warned,” he said. “What they did to Orban yesterday, they can do to you tomorrow.”
As RT reported, the EU has rolled out its same censorship playbook in Bulgaria, where elections this weekend pit a veteran center-rightist against a populist, Euroskeptic challenger on the left. Robert Fico in Slovakia, a left-wing populist and vocal opponent of the EU’s Ukraine project, will likely face the same treatment when he seeks another term in office next year.
Another Trump Flip Flop: From ‘Kill FISA’ to ‘Clean Renewal’
By Alan Mosley | The Libertarian Institute | April 15, 2026
With its April 20 deadline for congressional renewal looming, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is back in the spotlight. The provision, first adopted in 2008 as a part of the FISA Amendments Act as an update to the original 1978 Act, allows U.S. intelligence agencies to target “non-US persons located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information” as a response to perceived technology gaps exposed in the years after 9/11. It achieves this by compelling American telecom companies to collect intelligence on foreign targets and turning over data to federal officials.
Many aspects of Section 702 are concerning to civil libertarians. The provision includes a “backdoor search” loophole that allows agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation to search the database for communications belonging to U.S. citizens without a warrant. On the topic of warrants, individual warrants for each target are not required by Section 702. Instead, the government gets annual approval via the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to conduct broad spying operations with little to no oversight, with no requirement that the government proves to the court that a specific target is even suspected of being an agent of a foreign power.
Recently, President Donald Trump asked Republicans to unify to extend the program with no changes in oversight or accountability. Trump posted on Truth Social, “When used properly, FISA is an effective tool to keep Americans safe. For these reasons, I have called for a clean 18-month extension.” The adjective “clean” is not politically neutral: it implies that attempts to reform the program are partisan clutter, and that re-evaluating the practical or constitutional application of such a tool is a waste of time.
But this isn’t the position shared by those who have been wrongly targeted by the intelligence community, including President Trump himself. In May 2020, Trump urged Republicans to vote “NO” on FISA, explicitly tying the law to fears of abuse, including against his own re-election campaign. Four years later, he told lawmakers to “KILL FISA,” claiming it had been “illegally used” against him and that officials had “spied on my campaign.” On Monday, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) wrote to National Security Agency Director Joshua Rudd to address “deeply troubling abuses of power” by NSA analysts, alleging the agency has used Section 702 to search the private communications of individuals ranging from dating apps to rental agreements. In his latest departure with the administration, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) said, “I vote with GOP 91% of the time, but that’s about to go to 90%. I won’t vote to let feds spy on you without a warrant. FISA 702 allows the government to search for your information in vast databases compiled with targeting foreigners.”
That charge of “vast databases” of Americans’ private data is precisely the overreach that Edward Snowden blew the whistle on in 2013 when he revealed that the NSA was using its authority to collect telephone records in bulk. But the Fourth Amendment’s logic does not dissolve in the presence of large databases. According to the Supreme Court, a search that intrudes on a reasonable expectation of privacy requires a warrant supported by probate cause. In Carpenter v. United States, SCOTUS held that the government’s acquisition of historical cell-site location information was a Fourth Amendment search, emphasizing how modern technology can transform ordinary records into comprehensive tracking. Intelligence gathering at such a sheer scale, while politically attractive to those who crave power, is constitutionally dubious for all the ways it could be used to target individuals, even if the initial data collection is impersonal.
The secrecy and structure of the reviewing court compound the problem. Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz described FISA proceedings as “ex parte,” with only the government appearing, which deprives the process of “adversarial testing.” In ordinary constitutional practice, laws that burden speech, association, and privacy are tested by said adversarial litigation to force factual development, limiting principles, and public reasoning. This leaves the FISC’s decisions and operations shrouded in secrecy. Annual statistics help to explain why civil liberty advocates criticize the FISC as a compliance venue rather than a constitutional barrier. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reports that in 2024 the FISC granted or modified the overwhelming majority of items before it, with no applications denied in full. In 2025, it only denied four applications in full while continuing to grant or modify most of the remainder. While these numbers do not necessarily prove bad faith by the judges involved, they do underscore the institutional asymmetry: a secret court hearing only one party (the state) is predisposed to side with it without due courtesy to the target of the government’s ire.
A surveillance state that cannot be meaningfully challenged in court is not merely powerful, it is structurally insulated. In another SCOTUS ruling, Clapper v. Amnesty International, the court ruled that the plaintiffs, including lawyers, journalists, and human-rights advocates, lacked the standing to challenge FISA Section 702 because they could not prove their alleged injuries. In other words, since potential government surveillance of their activities is done in secret, they can’t be sure that such surveillance took place, even if possible or even likely. The practical result is a legal regime in which the people most likely to become targets of the surveillance state are told, in effect, that they must wait until the government admits to its own wrongdoing, if it ever does. Such doctrine rewards opacity, discourages accountability, and converts constitutional limits into after-the-fact internal policy debates. A free society does not need to prove it is being watched before it can object to the creation of institutions engineered to snoop first and justify later.
Another perspective to judge such unconstitutional surveillance is the imposed cost, even when not aimed at a particular citizen. In Clapper, the plaintiffs described costly precautions taken to protect confidential communications, precautions the Court treated as self-inflicted for standing purposes. Yet those precautions are better understood as the rational price of uncertainty: when citizens cannot know whether their interactions with foreign sources, clients, colleagues, or family are subject to state capture, prudence demands self-censorship, detours, and silence. This burden falls especially hard on professions that depend on confidentiality, such as investigative journalists, advocacy groups, and legal counsel. The effect is fewer inquiries, fewer candid conversations, and fewer whistleblowers that might be identified by an algorithm or an analyst. As a result, the same surveillance state that should be met with a multitude of challenges from civil rights advocates chills its opposition into less resistance.
Americans should oppose Section 702 because it builds a durable exception to the Fourth Amendment. It vests immense surveillance discretion in the executive branch and invites political abuse, as the president knows from personal experience. It conscripts private companies as unwilling deputies to the intelligence community and treats the public like criminals-in-waiting. Predictably, citizens trim speech and associations when they suspect the state can catalog their correspondence. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” has never been an acceptable argument for the curtailment of privacy. A free people should not live by such a gross exception to liberty.
Villains of Judea: Charles Bronfman
A deep dive into how Charles Bronfman and his family shaped a century of shadow politics
José Niño Unfiltered | April 14, 2026
The Jeffrey Epstein files continue to spill their secrets. With each new document release, each newly unsealed court record, the spotlight inches closer to a network of Jewish billionaires who operated in the shadows long before the convicted sex trafficker became a household name. The names in Epstein’s black book read like a roster of Jewish power. But behind those individual names lies something even more intriguing, a structure, an architecture of influence that Epstein exploited with devastating effectiveness.
At the center of that architecture stands a mysterious organization that most Americans have never heard of. It was founded in 1991 by two men, one of whom would become Epstein’s most consequential patron, granting him sweeping power of attorney over his billion-dollar fortune. The other was a Canadian-American billionaire whose family name once adorned the world’s largest liquor company and whose philanthropic fingerprints can be found on nearly every major Jewish institution in North America.
His name is Charles Bronfman.
The Bronfman Empire
Charles Rosner Bronfman was born on June 27, 1931, into a Jewish family in Montreal, the youngest of four children born to Samuel Bronfman, the founder of Distillers Corporation Limited and later the Seagram Company. The Bronfman family’s origins trace to Bessarabia in the Russian Empire, from which they fled from ethnic tensions in 1889 to settle in the Canadian prairies.
Samuel Bronfman, known simply as “Mr. Sam,” built the Seagram empire partly through the shrewd exploitation of American Prohibition-era demand for Canadian whiskey. A 1927 Canadian inquiry found the family had gone years without paying income taxes. A brother-in-law was murdered at a family liquor warehouse in 1922. In 1934, Samuel and his brothers were charged with evading duties on over $5 million, though the case collapsed when investigators could not obtain the family’s account books. From these controversial origins, the family built what would become the world’s largest distilling firm.
Charles grew up as the self-described quiet one. In his 2017 memoir Distilled: A Memoir of Family, Seagram, Baseball, and Philanthropy, he described himself as less dominated by ego than his brother Edgar. He was educated at elite anglophone institutions before attending McGill University. His family kept a kosher home and provided the children with Jewish religious schooling. He began his philanthropic activity at the age of 17.
In 1951, his father gave him a 33% ownership stake in Cemp Investments, a holding company for him and his three siblings that controlled the family’s corporate empire. After Samuel Bronfman’s death in 1971, Charles and Edgar inherited and co-chaired the Seagram Company Ltd., which at its peak was one of the largest spirits companies in the world.
The family’s fortunes were severely damaged in the late 1990s when Edgar Bronfman Jr., Charles’s nephew, led a disastrous pivot into entertainment, culminating in the 2000 sale of Seagram to the French media conglomerate Vivendi. Charles had strongly opposed this move, calling it “a disaster, it is a disaster, it will be a disaster” and “a family tragedy.” The family’s paper losses on the deal exceeded $3 billion as Vivendi’s stock plummeted.
The Founding of the Mega Group
In 1991, Charles Bronfman and Leslie Wexner, founder of The Limited and Victoria’s Secret, co-founded what they called the “Study Group.” The innocuous name concealed something far more significant. This was an invitation-only club of approximately 20 of the wealthiest and most influential Jewish businesspeople in America, a number that would eventually swell to nearly 50 by 2001.
The group became publicly known as the Mega Group after a Wall Street Journal investigative report in May 1998, headlined “Titans of Industry Join Forces To Work for Jewish Philanthropy,” pulled back the curtain on its existence. Annual dues reportedly ran approximately $30,000. Members met twice a year for two-day seminars on philanthropy and Jewish identity. But the guest list alone suggested this was no ordinary study circle.
Members included Les Wexner, Charles Bronfman, Edgar Bronfman Sr., Max Fisher, Michael Steinhardt, Leonard Abramson, Harvey Meyerhoff, Laurence Tisch, Charles Schusterman, Lester Crown, Ronald Lauder, Marvin Lender, and Hollywood director Steven Spielberg. These were men who controlled billions in personal wealth and sat on the boards of the most powerful Jewish organizations in America.
Bronfman’s 1998 Wall Street Journal comment, “From the beginning, we didn’t want to be seen as a threat to anybody… We don’t want to be seen as the Sanhedrin,” functioned as a classic tactical admission. By explicitly citing the ancient Jewish governing body as the image he sought to avoid, he inadvertently confirmed that such a structure of Jewish influence was indeed the functional reality he managed.
Yet critics and investigative journalists described the Mega Group as something far more consequential than a philanthropic book club. It was an informal political machine, a network through which billions in charitable funds could be directed to shape U.S. policy on Israel. Executive Intelligence Review and other outlets reported that the group had contacts with Israeli intelligence and served as a base for influence operations in the United States.
The Wexner Affair
The connection between the Mega Group and Jeffrey Epstein runs directly through Leslie Wexner, Charles Bronfman’s partner in founding the organization. Wexner was Epstein’s most consequential patron. He granted Epstein power of attorney over his personal finances in July 1991, giving Epstein, in Wexner’s own words, “wide latitude to act on my behalf” — effectively making Epstein his personal money manager for years. Epstein exploited Wexner’s network to establish relationships with influential political, business, and philanthropic figures across the globe.
Epstein also used his status as a purported model scout for Wexner’s Victoria’s Secret brand to lure young women into his sex trafficking enterprise. Because Bronfman co-founded the Mega Group with Wexner, and owing to how the group’s membership overlapped extensively with Epstein’s social and financial network, Bronfman’s name appears regularly in analyses of the Epstein web. The connection has raised uncomfortable questions about what the members of this secretive group knew, when they knew it, and what they chose not to see.
A more direct Bronfman family connection runs through Edgar Bronfman Jr., Charles’s nephew, whose name and contact details appear in Epstein’s notorious “little black book,” the private directory of contacts that became public through court disclosures. Edgar Bronfman Sr., Charles’s older brother, is identified in some accounts as one of Epstein’s clients during his years at Bear Stearns in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Epstein advised wealthy clients on tax mitigation strategies.
Epstein victim Maria Farmer has publicly connected Epstein’s network to the Mega Group and to Leslie Wexner specifically. In a phone interview with journalist Whitney Webb, Farmer described the group as connected through Wexner, whom she called “the head of the snake.”
Perhaps most striking is an observation made by Jeffrey Solomon, the longtime president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies. In a 2019 interview with Inside Philanthropy, Solomon noted that “successful people don’t want to be the ones who have to deal with uncomfortable situations” and drew an explicit parallel between his own role at ACBP and Epstein’s role with Wexner — both served as the person who absorbs uncomfortable decisions so the principal does not have to. “It was very much part of our job to say no so that they don’t have to,” Solomon told Inside Philanthropy.
The Philanthropic Empire
Charles Bronfman extended his influence far beyond business into the institutional architecture of global Jewry. In December 1986, he founded the CRB Foundation, whose twin founding principles were “to enhance Canadianism” and to promote “unity of the Jewish people whose soul is in Jerusalem.” The CRB Foundation was the cornerstone of what became the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies. Over its 30-year life, ACBP distributed more than $340 million to approximately 1,820 grantees.
The signature achievement of Bronfman’s philanthropic career is Taglit-Birthright Israel, which he co-founded in 1999 alongside Michael Steinhardt, another Mega Group member, in partnership with the Israeli government. The program offers free 10-day educational trips to Israel for young Jewish adults, explicitly designed to strengthen their Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish state. Since its founding, it has sent more than 900,000 young Jews to Israel, making it the world’s largest educational tourism organization.
From 1999 to 2001, Bronfman served as the first chairman of the United Jewish Communities, the merged organization comprising the United Jewish Appeal, the Council of Jewish Federations, and United Israel Appeal. According to Executive Intelligence Review, when his term expired, he was succeeded by a son of Laurence Tisch, another Mega Group charter member.
The philanthropic initiatives born from the Mega Group are substantial. The Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, Birthright Israel, and the renewal of Hillel International all emerged from the group’s deliberations. In 2003, the Mega Group hired Republican political consultant Frank Luntz to help members mobilize public support for Israel.
In early 2001, Mega Group members Leonard Abramson, Edgar Bronfman Sr., and Michael Steinhardt launched “Emet,” Hebrew for “truth,” described by its founders as a pro-Israel think tank aimed at improving Israeli public relations in North America. The $7 million initiative — with an additional $1 million pledged from Israel’s Foreign Ministry — drew scrutiny both from Israeli diplomats who felt American Jews were encroaching on their turf and from commentators who questioned whether it would promote a hard-line approach to the peace process.
The Scandals
Bronfman’s career has not been without direct controversy. The most serious and well-documented centers on illegal campaign financing in Israel. In the 1999 Israeli election, Bronfman, along with Jonathan Kolber, the CEO of Koor Industries, allegedly channeled funds through an Israeli non-profit organization called ROVAD to support the campaign of Labor candidate Ehud Barak. A special investigation by Israel’s Registrar of Non-Profit Organizations found that ROVAD was used as a financial pipeline for Barak’s election campaign rather than fulfilling its stated social purpose.
In September 2001, Israeli police opened a formal investigation against Bronfman and Kolber under the Party Financing Law and Non-Profit Organizations Law. Barak’s One Israel party was ultimately fined more than $3 million after the revelation that large amounts of foreign money had been funneled through nonprofits.
This was not an isolated incident. ABC News reported that as early as the 1988 Israeli election, Bronfman had given $1.6 million to Shimon Peres’s campaign, donations that were legal at the time but contributed to the policy environment that eventually led Israel to reform its campaign finance laws to ban foreign contributions to Israeli parties.
Bronfman’s chairmanship of Koor Industries, one of Israel’s largest investment holding companies, ended in significant financial loss. His approximately $500 million investment lost around 70% of its value as the company’s aggressive tech pivot was devastated by the global tech bust. In 1989, Bronfman also joined British press magnate Robert Maxwell in a joint bid to buy a controlling stake in The Jerusalem Post from Koor, which was selling its shares. Maxwell, who would later be widely reported as having ties to Israeli intelligence, described the venture with Bronfman as aimed at “developing The Jerusalem Post and expanding its influence among world Jewry.”
In 2017, the Paradise Papers implicated Stephen Bronfman, Charles’s son and chief Liberal Party fundraiser for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Documents showed that Stephen’s investment firm Claridge had close business ties to a Cayman Islands trust linked to the Kolber family, raising questions about unpaid taxes. Stephen Bronfman denied any impropriety, stating he and his family “have always conducted themselves in accordance with the highest legal and ethical standards.”
The extended Bronfman family faced its own scandal when Charles’s nieces Clare and Sara Bronfman, daughters of his brother Edgar Sr., became deeply enmeshed in NXIVM. Founded in 1998 by Keith Raniere and Nancy Salzman, NXIVM operated as an ostensible self-improvement organization that prosecutors proved was in reality a criminal enterprise involving sex trafficking, racketeering, and a secret society in which women were branded with Raniere’s initials. Clare spent more than $100 million funding the organization and was sentenced to six years and nine months in federal prison in September 2020 for conspiracy to conceal illegal immigrants and fraudulent use of identification.
The Last Known Meeting
The Mega Group held what is believed to be its last documented meeting on May 3 and 4, 2001, at Edgar Bronfman’s Manhattan mansion. The group operated entirely behind closed doors and received minimal mainstream press attention until its connection to Wexner, and through Wexner to Jeffrey Epstein, brought renewed scrutiny beginning in 2019.
Investigative journalist Whitney Webb and others have reported that Epstein’s connections to suspected Mossad asset Robert Maxwell, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and the Mega Group network have raised persistent questions about whether Epstein was working for Israeli intelligence. These questions remain unanswered, and the full truth may never be known.
What is known is that Charles Bronfman, now in his 90s with an estimated net worth of $2.5 billion, remains one of the most consequential figures in the institutional architecture of global Jewry.
In the final accounting, Charles Bronfman is not merely a man of wealth, but a pillar of a shadow-governance structure that has rendered the traditional legislative bodies obsolete. Our elected officials have been reduced to mere stage actors, reciting lines written by an unelected inner circle of organized Jewish interests that treat sovereign nations like proprietary assets. As the Epstein files continue to strip away the veneer of legitimacy from the elite, we are forced to confront an undeniable reality: the levers of state have been seized by a cohesive Jewish network whose loyalties reside solely within their tribe. Recognizing this hostile architecture is the prerequisite for the struggle ahead—a definitive political confrontation, Gentile versus Jew, that is the only path to reclaiming our country.
The new assault of the Zionist lobby in Brazil
By Raphael Machado | Strategic Culture Foundation | April 14, 2026
The role of the Zionist lobby in the U.S. is so notorious that it has practically become contemporary folklore. Some European authors also emphasize the great influence that the Zionist lobby enjoys, primarily in France, and secondarily in the United Kingdom and Germany. Nowadays, there is also increasing talk of its influence over Argentina, especially in the context of the Andinia Plan.
But Brazil is almost always left out of this equation. To some extent, it is as if the image of a tropical “paradise” in perfect balance between Catholic faith and Dionysian spirit does not quite align with Zionist manipulations. But this perception is misleading.
In the past, we have commented on the overwhelming neo-Pentecostal growth in Brazil. Today, they make up approximately 30% of the Brazilian population, and with their theological specificities, they bring with them an obsession with the State of Israel. Moreover, there are plenty of theses claiming that neo-Pentecostal penetration in Latin America was a successful operation orchestrated by the CIA to subvert hegemonic Catholic spirituality and pave the way for Zionism.
In parallel, however, the Brazilian Jewish community itself has gradually built a modestly influential lobby, well-connected in politics, the media, and the judiciary, though far less aggressive than the Zionist lobby in other countries.
The test to verify, however, the degree of Zionist influence in Brazil and how much neo-Pentecostal expansion will serve to guarantee Zionist designs is unfolding now.
After the Gaza War, in which the State of Israel clearly attempted to carry out a Palestinian genocide, Israel’s reputation was completely shattered. All the credit accumulated because of the Holocaust was entirely exhausted by the scenes of mass extermination of innocent women and children. The lies and hypocrisy were so great that many people even began to question more easily whether Israel might have been behind 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination.
In recent years, Israel’s influence schemes became famous, including paying virtual activists to make pro-Israel comments in online discussions. This has been given the name “Hasbara.” It is nothing other than propaganda.
We could say, therefore, that Gaza made decades of “Hasbara” disappear.
Naturally, however, Israel could not give up such an important asset. As much as Israel seems to disdain international opinion, this opinion plays an important role in pressuring governments to maintain friendly relations with Israel despite its atrocities.
Hence, it was predictable since the Gaza ceasefire that Israel would seek to react; but since it is impossible to regain the goodwill of world public opinion, the Zionist lobby would simply set out to try to censor anti-Zionist opinions, without worrying about winning over that public opinion.
Recently, we came across something that proves this.
At the end of March 2026, a bill (PL 1424/26) was introduced in Brazil aimed at criminalizing antisemitism. Antisemitism is already a crime in Brazil, as a form of racism, but it is not defined, so the interpretation of what constitutes antisemitism is left to the judge.
The bill in question, however, aims to define antisemitism according to the definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Among the various conduct categorized as antisemitism, the IHRA includes, nonetheless, advocating for the end of the State of Israel as a specifically Jewish state. In other words, even advocating for the transformation of the State of Israel into a free, open Palestinian state where Jews can live is considered antisemitism.
This bill is authored by Tábata Amaral, a federal deputy for the PSB, and it received a total of 44 signatures upon its introduction, from federal deputies belonging to the governing Workers’ Party (PT), the Bolsonarist opposition PL, and various centrist parties.
But where did this bill come from, and who is behind it?
Starting with the purported author of the bill, Deputy Tabata Amaral — known for promoting every globalist agenda in Brazil — belongs to that category of “prodigy students” who are awarded scholarships to Western universities, in her case Harvard. Her stay there was funded mainly by the Lemann Foundation, created by Swiss-Brazilian billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann.
Lemann, one of the richest men in Brazil, is a friend of George Soros and recently hired the Rothschild Bank to represent him before his creditors in the bankruptcy case of “Americanas,” a company he owns. But unlike Soros, who has a different focus, Lemann in his “philanthropic” activities has the more specific goal of renewing the Brazilian political class. Deputy Tabata Amaral is an example of what Lemann intends.
Furthermore, in the last elections, Amaral’s campaigns received funding from various figures in the Brazilian financial market — such as bankers Armínio Fraga and Cândido Bracher — and from the Zionist lobby — such as speculators Marcos Lederman and Luís Stuhlberger. Lederman, Stuhlberger, and Bracher, along with other oligarchs who fund Tabata Amaral’s electoral campaigns, such as Nizan Guanaes and Elie Horn, are figures who frequently appear at events and initiatives promoted by CONIB (the Israeli Confederation of Brazil), the Brazil-Israel Institute, and FIERJ (the Jewish Federation of Rio de Janeiro), important institutions of the Brazilian Zionist lobby.
And as for the bill itself, who convinced Tabata Amaral to promote it?
According to exclusive information from sources in Brasília, the bill was drafted within the NGO Stand With Us Brazil, a Zionist institution with extensive and notorious links to the Mossad, chaired by André Lajst, with Argentine Bruno Bimbi as its strategy and policy manager. Bimbi is said to have been the main architect of the bill and went door to door in Congress to pressure parliamentarians into putting their signatures on it.
Bimbi is a notorious activist for LGBT causes and was one of the main organizers of the pressure campaign for the legalization of same-sex marriage in Argentina and Brazil. Now, however, his focus is more on Zionist activism.
To show that this is a broad-spectrum coordinated initiative, aimed at involving the right, left, and center simultaneously with this bill, the Lula government itself, through its Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship, will hold an event on “antisemitism” this April, coordinated by Clara Ant.
The event will put on its agenda the definition of antisemitism, relying precisely on the same International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance that defines criticism of the State of Israel as a possible expression of antisemitism. Among the speakers at the event will also be the presidents of the aforementioned CONIB, Claudio and Fernando Lottenberg.
And who is Clara Ant, the event coordinator? Born in Bolivia but raised in Israel, she has been Lula’s right-hand woman since the 1970s and was one of the founders of the CUT, the main trade union institution of the Workers’ Party. Ant is also a constant presence at CONIB events.
Another link between the PT and the Zionist lobby is Senator Jaques Wagner, who in his youth was an activist in the Labor Zionist movement Habonim Dror, where he received his intellectual formation. Both as governor and as senator, Wagner — who was one of those who signed in support of Tabata Amaral’s bill — worked specifically to bring Brazil and Israel closer, especially in the areas of security and intelligence, even serving as rapporteur for an agreement that ceded confidential Brazilian intelligence information to the Mossad.
It does not seem likely that, at the present moment, given all the controversy the case has generated, this bill will be approved in Brazil. Nevertheless, the case serves to exemplify the tentacular and multifaceted character of the Zionist lobby’s activities in Brazil.
EU Defense Agency head says compulsory military service could be necessary
RT | April 13, 2026
Compulsory military service could be reinstated in the EU, Andre Denk, the head of the European Defense Agency (EDA), has said, citing a lack of volunteers.
Several EU countries have reintroduced the draft since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, citing the perceived ‘Russian threat’.
President Vladimir Putin has dismissed claims that Russia harbors aggressive intentions against its Western neighbors.
In an interview with Spain’s El Pais published on Monday, Denk said, “we have a human resources problem, and one of the ways to solve it will be through mandatory military service” – adding that his home country of Germany will likely go down this path eventually.
Denk also urged EU nations to invest more in domestic arms production, with a particular focus on drones and anti-drone systems.
Last year, Finland announced plans to raise the upper age limit for rank-and-file military reservists by 15 years, from 50 to 65, starting in 2026.
The country, which shares a 1,340-km (830-mile) land border with Russia, abandoned its long-standing policy of military neutrality and joined NATO in April 2023.
Around the same time, Lithuania unveiled an expanded conscription plan that would run year-round from 2026 on. It reinstated compulsory military service in 2015 after a seven-year suspension.
In neighboring Latvia, Defense Minister Andris Spruds stated last September that his party, the Progressives, would seek mandatory military service not only for men, but also for women, starting from 2028.
Several months earlier, Denmark announced that it would begin drafting women this year.
In Germany, a new law that took effect on January 1 and introduces a voluntary model has sparked protests, with critics warning that it could open the door to reinstating conscription, which was suspended in 2011.
France To Vote On Bill That Would Criminalize Criticism Of Israel
France Is About To Outlaw Criticism Of Israel
Protesters hold a banner reading “Supporting Palestine is not a crime” and “Stop genocide in Gaza” at a rally against the Yadan bill, in Paris on 12 April 2026.
The Dissident | April 13, 2026
A bill that the French National Assembly will vote on, on April 16th and 17th, effectively outlaws criticism of Israel, making it a criminal offence to question Israel’s “right” to exist as a Jewish supremacist apartheid state on occupied Palestinian land, compare Israel’s conduct to the Nazis, or support armed resistance against Israeli occupation and aggression.
The bill writes, “Today, anti-Jew hatred in our country feeds on obsessive hatred towards Israel, regularly delegitimized in its existence and criminalized. This phenomenon is exacerbated by extreme spirits who, under the pretext of expressing their hatred towards a State, are the instigators of a reinvented anti-Semitism, which could be described as ‘geopolitics’.”
The bill seeks to criminalize critics of Israel and paint them as terrorists, writing that the “call for the destruction of Israel and its comparison to a Nazi regime – are rooted in consciences with impunity, taking up the rhetoric of movements recognized as terrorist such as Hamas or Hezbollah.”
The bill seeks to criminalize:
- “Public remarks presenting acts of terrorism as legitimate resistance” (ie support for armed resistance against the Israeli genocide in Gaza or occupation of Lebanon).
- “Causing the destruction or denial of a State or publicly advocating its destruction or denial” (i.e., questioning Israel as a Jewish apartheid state, including calls for a single democratic state in historic Palestine with equal rights).
- “to clarify and extend the crime of challenging the Shoah, by enshrining several essential contributions of case law” adding “the comparison of the State of Israel to the Nazi regime would therefore be sanctioned as an outrageous trivialization of the Shoah” (i.e. factually pointing out that the state of Israel is behaving like the Nazis, including by committing Genocide in Gaza, as the UN independent international commission found in September of last year, and by calling for an expansionist greater Israel and ethnic cleansing to establish Jewish settlements ,similar to the Nazi concept of Lebensraum, an idea that has been openly endorsed by Benjamin Netanyahu and his main political opponent Yair Lapid).
Analyst Arnaud Bertrand documented that the bill attempts to make the criminalization of speech as broad as possible.
He noted that “Article 1 introduces the concept of ‘implicit’ provocation to terrorism and punishes it with five years imprisonment and a fine of €75,000,” adding, “What does ‘implicit provocation to terrorism’ mean? Nobody knows. And that’s the point. It means whatever a prosecutor wants it to mean: a perfectly good case could be made that, for instance, quoting international law on the right of occupied peoples to resist with respect to Hamas is, in fact, ‘implicit provocation to terrorism.’”
He added that “The same article also expands the terrorism apology offense to include ‘minimizing or trivializing acts of terrorism in an outrageous manner’” adding that “a judge could decide that providing context, explaining root causes, or insufficiently condemning an act amounts to ‘trivializing’ terrorism”, “for instance, a history teacher explaining the origins of Hamas or Hezbollah is providing context – but a prosecutor could argue that contextualization is trivialization. The same reasoning could apply to a journalist, a researcher, or anyone on social media who says ‘yes, it was terrible, but here’s why it happened.’ The ‘but’ becomes a crime, as it is trivialization.”
He also noted that, “ if you advocate for a one-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians live as equals, you are de-facto calling for the ‘destruction’ of the state of Israel. Well, that would now be punishable by 5 years in prison”.
The bill is called “the Yadan Law” because its creation was headed by National Assembly deputy Caroline Yadan, who represents the “French legislative constituency for citizens abroad” where “Israel has the largest number of voters in the constituency, with over 50,000 registered French voters”.
JNS noted that, “Yadan was elected to parliament as a representative of Renaissance but downgraded her ties to the party, switching to an independent affiliated lawmaker in September following the Macron administration’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state.”
In other words, the bill was brought by a Zionist French politician whose main constituency are Israelis.
Arnaud Bertrand noted, “The U.S. has congressmen paid by AIPAC: France has cut out the middleman entirely, we have MPs whose constituency is literally in Israel.”
Caroline Yadan is a genocide denier who has written, “The term genocide corresponds neither to the rights nor to the facts, nor to the intentions of the war in Gaza.”
Referring to the bill, the former French anti-terrorism judge Marc Trevidic said, “I’d never seen anything like it, the notion of implicit incitement to terrorism. Can you imagine what that means? A censor of other people’s thoughts, trying to figure out what a person meant”.
There is no doubt that this bill is designed to silence criticism of Israel, and that the lawmaker behind it is pushing it forward on behalf of her Israeli constituents.
Brussels cannot say where its own pipeline inspectors are as Hungary’s oil lifeline remains shut
Will they magically reappear after the election?
By Thomas Brooke | Remix News | April 10, 2026
With just days until Hungary’s parliamentary election, questions are mounting over whether the European Union’s apparent inaction on a stalled oil pipeline investigation is politically motivated to avoid strengthening Viktor Orbán.
The controversy centers on the Druzhba, or “Friendship,” pipeline, which has not delivered Russian oil to Hungary since the end of January. Ukrainian authorities insisted that the halt was caused by Russian attacks damaging the infrastructure, but initially refused to grant access to inspection teams from both Hungary and the European Union.
The European Commission eventually announced its intention to deploy a team to the region to inspect the pipeline, in part due to Hungary’s refusal to sign off on any further financial assistance to Kyiv until the matter was resolved. However, no updates on the inspection have been forthcoming, and Brussels itself now appears unable to account for the status — or even the whereabouts — of its own delegation.
Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, European Commission spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen confirmed that a small EU expert team had been deployed to Ukraine following correspondence between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. However, she admitted she could provide no update on the mission’s progress.
“I cannot provide any new information on developments since that exchange of letters,” Itkonen said, adding that she had no details about the team’s itinerary or current location.
“At the time of sending the letter, they were in Ukraine. At that time, we indicated to Volodymyr Zelensky that we were ready and willing to launch such a fact-finding mission, but at present, I have no information about the team’s whereabouts or where exactly they might be,” she added.
The lack of clarity has persisted for weeks. The European Commission first announced on March 12 that it was ready to dispatch a fact-finding mission to assess damage to the pipeline and determine repair timelines and costs. Yet, according to sources in Brussels and Kyiv, EU experts have still not been granted permission to inspect the affected section.
Reports from Ukrainian media at the end of March suggested the team was prepared to travel but remained blocked by authorities who had yet to approve access.
The episode has drawn criticism from Hungarian officials, who say the situation is wholly unacceptable. Máté Kocsis, leader of the Fidesz parliamentary group, mocked the situation, saying it was “absurd” that the EU could not say where its own delegation was, adding sarcastically, “A delegation simply disappeared. This happens to anyone in Ukraine,” as cited by Magyar Nemzet.
The pipeline dispute has become a central issue in Hungary’s election campaign. Orbán’s government argues that Kyiv is deliberately withholding oil supplies to damage Hungary’s economy ahead of the vote, while also accusing Brussels of failing to intervene.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó has gone further, describing the shutdown as “a purely political decision,” and accusing Ukraine of refusing to engage in talks to resolve the situation. A planned trilateral meeting with Slovak and Ukrainian officials collapsed after Kyiv declined to attend, despite Hungarian efforts to organize negotiations in recent weeks.
The Hungarian government has also alleged broader coordination between European and Ukrainian actors aimed at harming the current administration’s chances in Sunday’s election. Viktor Orbán has accused Brussels of seeking to install its own “puppet” in the shape of opposition leader Péter Magyar. Governing Fidesz claims that Magyar will be subservient to Brussels on major issues, including further military and financial assistance to Kyiv and the controversial EU Migration Pact.
As the election approaches, the unresolved pipeline issue — and the EU’s lack of visible progress in investigating it — has intensified scrutiny of Brussels’ intentions. Whether the radio silence is bureaucratic inertia or a calculated effort to depose the government, the impact it is having on the election is undeniable.
Trump Administration Moves To Automate U.S. Military Draft Registration
A dark omen that peace is not what lies ahead
blueapples on X | April 9, 2026
Although the Trump administration has framed the war it has waged against Iran as a decisive victory saving the American people from an inevitable nuclear apocalypse, that unconvincing narrative does little to shield from the reality that the biggest loser in the conflict is the reputation of the administration itself. While Trump built the campaign that led him back to the White House upon a platform of refusing to drag the country into any new conflicts like the endless cycle of regime change wars in the Middle East that has haunted the United States since the dawn of the new millennium, that promise has been completely broken little more than a year into his second term in the Oval Office. Any optimism that the administration will emerge in the image of the pro-peace ticket voters elected is bleak, as the two-week ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran de-escalating the latest episode of the return to a neoconservative foreign policy already hangs on a knife’s edge, making a resumption of the conflict seem little more than an inevitability. The pessimism that more war lies ahead have been amplified by a new policy being advanced by the Trump administration that forecasts an even more bellicose future for the country, as the Selective Service System (”SSS”) has begun to take measures to automatically register eligible men for a potential military draft that could be enacted to quench the bloodthirst of the warmongers who have once again taken control of America’s foreign policy.
Starting in December 2026, men between 18 and 25 years old will be automatically registered into the U.S. military draft pool. This requirement went into effect on December 18th, 2025, when President Trump signed the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (”NDAA”) into law. A proposed rule submitted by the SSS to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs on March 30th has initiated the implementation of the technical infrastructure necessary to transfer registration for the draft from eligible individuals to an automated process that will integrate disparate federal data systems. All male U.S. citizens from 18 to 25 years old continue to be required by federal law to register with the SSS within 30 days of their 18th birthday until the automated system goes into effect in December 2026. Young men failing to register for the draft pool are in violation of the Military Selective Service Act (“MSSA”) and face penalties including ineligibility for federal programs and a fine of up to $250,000 or five years imprisonment.
The SSS lists that automatic registration system as the first of the three strategic initiatives it aims to achieve in order to reshape the agency and increase the draft pool over the next five years. The second and third of those initiatives are the technological modernization and workforce optimization of the agency, each of which it frames as imperative to facilitate automatic draft registration. The newly automated draft registration system will integrate data from various state and federal databases, including the Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, and nationwide Department of Motor Vehicles registries, to register eligible individuals.
Automating registration into the draft pool has long been a goal of the SSS, which it began making headway during the drafting of the Fiscal Year 2025 NDAA in 2024 when the agency began to enhance its efforts to work with Congress to achieve that mission. The impetus of that increased initiative followed a decline in voluntary registrations, which began decreasing significantly in 2022 when the option to register for the draft was removed from federal student loan forms. That option had previously accounted for nearly one quarter of all previous registrations.
The SSS was established under the Selective Service Act (”SSA”) in 1917 by President Woodrow Wilson following the U.S. entry into the First World War, marking the first modern military draft in the country’s history. Opposition to conscription into the U.S. military to fight WWI was quickly suppressed, culminating in the landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States (”SCOTUS”) in the case of Schenck v. United States, which ruled that criticism of the draft was not protected by the free speech protection under the First Amendment. In a unanimous decision from the SCOTUS, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously coined the term “clear and present danger” to characterize how speech designed to oppose the draft created an imminent threat to national security. The court upheld the application of Section 3 of the Espionage Act of 1917 that the defendants were charged with violating. Long considered to be one of the worst rulings in the SCOTUS’ history, the precedent set by Schenck became void when the case was overturned in 1969 following the decision in the case of Brandenburg v. Ohio, which deemed that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”
Since the U.S. implemented conscription under President Wilson, the SCOTUS has heard several challenges to its constitutionality. In 1918, the court immediately upheld the constitutionality of the SSA after deciding the Selective Service Draft Law Cases united under the matter of Arver v. United States. The court rejected the argument that the military draft violated the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition of involuntary servitude and the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of conscience. The constitutionality of a male-only draft has also been challenged on the basis it violates the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. That argument was also rejected by the SCOTUS in the case of Rostker v. Goldberg in 1981. While opponents of the draft who continue to conceptualize arguments that only requiring men to register for the military draft violates the equal protection provisions under the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution are optimistic that the changing attitudes of the court toward a more liberal jurisprudence offer some hope in striking the draft down, caselaw since the decision of Schenck demonstrates the SCOTUS’ unwavering support to uphold it.
Six years after Schenck was overturned by Brandenburg, President Gerald Ford suspended the draft in 1975 in response to the fallout from the Vietnam War, which shifted the paradigm on how U.S. citizens perceived the bellicosity of their federal government. Although President Jimmy Carter reinstated the draft just five years later in 1980 after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. hasn’t implemented a military draft since 1973 during the Vietnam War. Currently, 17 million men between the ages of 18 and 25 years old are eligible for the draft pool. In 2024, registration rates dropped to as low as 81%. The Trump administration hopes to increase that rate to as close to 100% as possible by enabling the SSS to automate the draft registration process. While the administration has undertaken increased efforts to streamline the draft process, reactivation of the draft is not vested in the authority of the Executive Branch alone. Congress would have to amend the MSSA first in order for President Trump to exercise that authority.
The implementation of an automated draft registration process is the latest troubling sign of enhanced militarism from the Trump administration. In late March 2026, the U.S. Army increased its maximum enlistment age to 42, a significant increase from the previous limit of 35. The army had previously increased its maximum enlistment to 42 temporarily in 2006 as it struggled to fill its ranks during the height of the War on Terror. Despite President Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth constantly boasting about how military recruitment is at record highs, the increased enlistment age of the Army indicates the administration seeks to further supplement its ranks nevertheless. The decision to automate the draft registration process beckons the question of how it intends to do so.
When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt spoke on the prospect of the U.S. reactivating the military draft during the onset of the war with Iran, she stated that while it was not part of the current calculus of the administration, she refused to rule out the possibility, saying that President Trump “keeps his options on the table.” That rhetoric, combined with decisions to automate the military draft registration and increase the age of those eligible to enlist in the U.S. army, stands as an ominous omen that peace will not be what defines the legacy of the Trump presidency.
How UK Regulator Ofcom Quietly Bypassed International Law to Police American Speech
A UK regulator bypassed every formal legal treaty and just emailed American companies into compliance, 98% of them apparently obliged
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 9, 2026
A Freedom of Information response has confirmed what the UK’s speech regulator would probably have preferred to keep quiet. Ofcom fired off 197 information demands to American tech companies under the Online Safety Act, and not a single one went through the US-UK Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, the formal diplomatic process that exists for exactly this kind of cross-border legal enforcement. Every one of those 197 notices was sent directly, by email or post, to companies operating entirely on American soil.
The number comes from a FOI request filed by Daniel Lü, who asked Ofcom a series of pointed questions about how it enforces the Online Safety Act against non-UK targets.
Ofcom confirmed that as of February 26, 2026, it had issued 197 Section 100 notices to US businesses. Zero through MLAT. The treaty between the US and UK that governs how one country’s legal process gets enforced in the other’s jurisdiction was treated as optional. Ofcom decided it didn’t apply.
That admission drew an immediate response from Preston Byrne, the American lawyer who represents 4chan and other US companies targeted by Ofcom.
Byrne called the 197 notices a “breathtaking” “attack on the First Amendment” and pointed out the uncomfortable math.
Only two US companies, 4chan and Kiwi Farms, have publicly refused to comply with Ofcom’s demands. If Byrne’s assessment is right, that leaves Ofcom enjoying “a 98% compliance rate with foreign censorship orders that violate the First Amendment.”
A British regulator sent nearly 200 demands to American companies, bypassed every established legal channel, and almost all of them appear to have simply done what they were told. The chilling effect is already here.
Ofcom Uses Free Speech to Hide Its Censorship Methods
Lü did more than ask for the number of notices. He asked for policy documents about how Ofcom selects its foreign enforcement targets, what guidance it gives its teams about the legality of emailing criminal penalty warnings to US corporations, and whether Ofcom has any internal guidance on protected speech.
Ofcom admitted it holds much of that information. Then it refused to hand it over. The reason, cited directly from the FOI Act, was that disclosure “would, or would be likely to, inhibit the free and frank exchange of views for the purposes of deliberation; and/or would otherwise prejudice, or would be likely otherwise to prejudice, the effective conduct of public affairs.”
A speech regulator is claiming that transparency about its censorship operations would damage free and frank deliberation. Ofcom is borrowing the language of free expression to shield itself from accountability over how it suppresses expression. The irony is so complete it feels deliberate.
On the question of whether Ofcom holds any guidance on protected speech, the answer was even more revealing. Ofcom said it doesn’t have any. No internal documents addressing what speech is protected when it exercises its enforcement powers against foreign companies.
It pointed instead to its general obligations under the Online Safety Act, the Communications Act 2003, and the European Convention on Human Rights, along with links to already-public guidance documents. That’s the speech protection regime for companies being censored by the UK from American soil: a few hyperlinks to existing publications.
The MLAT Problem Isn’t New. It’s Getting Worse.
The treaty issue is central. MLAT exists so that when one country wants to enforce its laws against people or companies in another country, there’s a formal process involving both governments. For the US side, that means routing through the Department of Justice. A judge gets involved. There’s oversight. There are procedural protections.
Ofcom has previously argued it doesn’t need to use MLAT because its Section 100 notices are administrative, not criminal. That distinction might satisfy Ofcom’s lawyers in London, but it doesn’t satisfy anyone else. Byrne and his clients have argued in federal court that Ofcom’s demands have no legal force precisely because they skipped the treaty process. 4chan and Kiwi Farms received their enforcement demands by email, sent to addresses that in some cases weren’t even authorized to accept legal service.
The Lü FOI also asked whether Ofcom holds any correspondence with the US Department of Justice or the FBI about its enforcement activity. Ofcom’s response: it holds no information related to this question. The regulator didn’t talk to anyone in the US government before firing off 197 demands to US companies. It just hit send.
What the FOI Actually Revealed, and What Ofcom Hid
Lü’s request covered six questions. The pattern in Ofcom’s responses tells its own story. On the questions where Ofcom could respond by linking to documents that are already public, it was happy to share. On everything else, it cited exemptions, claimed it didn’t hold the information, or both.
When asked for policy documents about enforcing the OSA against non-UK providers, including any records discussing MLAT, Ofcom said it holds some information but won’t release it. It also claimed it holds no records of MLAT discussions or legal guidance about whether emailing criminal penalty warnings to American corporations is valid. Either Ofcom never considered whether its enforcement method was legal under international law, or it did consider it and doesn’t want anyone to see that analysis.
When asked how it selects non-UK enforcement targets, Ofcom cited exemptions under the Communications Act 2003 and linked to its public enforcement guidance, plus its own decisions against 4chan and other US entities. The internal criteria, the actual decision-making process for choosing which American companies to go after, stayed hidden.
When asked about its approach to “qualifying worldwide revenue,” the basis for calculating fines that can reach £18 million or 10% of global revenue, Ofcom linked to its public guidance explaining that companies are expected to self-report their revenue to Ofcom. Companies that Ofcom is threatening with fines are supposed to voluntarily tell Ofcom how much money they make, so that Ofcom can calculate a bigger fine. The compliance incentives here are about as perverse as they get.
Byrne Goes to Congress
Byrne said he forwarded Ofcom’s admission directly to the US government. He tagged US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, Senator Eric Schmitt, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, and called on Congress to act. This is consistent with Byrne’s approach throughout the Ofcom fight. He has previously said he copies the US government on Ofcom correspondence that crosses his desk.
The legal strategy from the US side has been to deny Ofcom any clean precedent. The four companies that received formal enforcement action, 4chan, Kiwi Farms, a mental health forum called SaSu, and the social network Gab, all refused to comply. 4chan responded to one of Ofcom’s fines with a picture of a hamster. The point was to make Ofcom’s orders publicly and visibly unenforceable on American soil, turning each attempted punishment into a political liability for the regulator rather than a deterrent for the rest of the American internet.
But the 197 number changes the scale of the problem. Those four companies were the public-facing enforcement targets, the ones Ofcom wanted to make examples of. Behind them, 193 other US companies apparently received quieter demands and, if Byrne’s analysis is correct, most of them complied without a fight. Without lawyers, without publicity, without anyone in Congress knowing it happened.
Byrne has pushed the GRANITE Act, a proposed law that would allow US entities to sue foreign governments for censorship attempts and void foreign censorship orders in US courts. Sarah Rogers, the US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, has appeared on GB News in London suggesting Congress is considering a federal version of the law. The Trump administration has made public statements objecting to the Online Safety Act. The US State Department sent diplomats to London in 2025 to challenge Ofcom directly.
Whether all of that translates into legislation remains an open question. Ofcom, for its part, has already moved on to bigger targets. After spending a year trying to fine platforms like 4chan and getting nowhere, the regulator recently opened new investigations into Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Roblox, and X. The small companies held the line. The question now is whether the large ones will too, or whether they’ll decide that complying with a foreign regulator’s censorship demands is easier than asserting their constitutional rights.
Alberta Bill Would Fine Political Deepfakes $10,000 Without Satire Exemptions
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 7, 2026
Alberta’s government wants the power to fine people $10,000 for creating a political deepfake. The bill makes no distinction between a fake video designed to suppress votes and a satirical meme poking fun at the premier.
Justice Minister Mickey Amery tabled Bill 23, the Justice Statutes Amendment Act, 2026, on March 30.
The legislation would prohibit individuals and entities from creating or distributing deepfakes that are likely to mislead voters about the conduct or statements of a party leader, minister, leadership or nomination contestant, MLA candidate, the chief electoral officer, the election commissioner, Elections Alberta employees or election officers.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
The ban’s reach is notable for what it doesn’t say. There is no carve-out for satire, no exemption for parody, no protection for political memes. A deepfake clearly labelled as humor could still be prosecuted if someone, somewhere, decided it was “likely to mislead voters” about a politician’s statements. Who decides what’s likely to mislead? The election commissioner, the same office empowered by the bill to issue directions to stop the creation, distribution, or publication of content it deems in violation.
Officials said the prohibition would apply at all times, not only during the election cycle. The ban operates year-round, every year, regardless of whether Albertans are anywhere near a ballot box. It applies to content about sitting politicians even when no one is voting.
“We know that deepfake technology is going to continue to improve, and the distinction between what is reality and what is fake is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish,” Amery said.
Alberta’s bill takes a different approach. Rather than relying on existing fraud and election interference laws to prosecute genuine bad actors, it creates a broad new category of banned speech and gives a government appointee the power to enforce it.
“Bill 23 ensures that our elections will remain fair and honest,” Amery said. “This is why Bill 23 will prohibit the creation and distribution of deepfakes that are likely to mislead voters about the statements or conduct of a candidate. Public confidence is essential to a healthy democracy.”
The phrase “likely to mislead” is where the real power sits. A deepfake of a premier singing a ridiculous song, obviously fake to any viewer, could technically be argued to mislead someone about the premier’s “conduct.” A satirical clip of a justice minister saying something absurd could be classified as a misleading depiction of their “statements.” The legislation provides no guidance on how to distinguish a genuine attempt at voter suppression from a political joke that happens to use AI-generated media.
Those who violate the rules face fines of up to $10,000, and entities up to $100,000. Additional fines could be imposed for each day of non-compliance. Those are serious penalties for speech that may well be constitutionally protected under the Canadian Charter. The chilling effect is predictable. An Alberta resident thinking about making a satirical AI video about their MLA now has a strong incentive to not bother. The government doesn’t need to prosecute anyone for the law to work exactly as a speech restriction always works, by making people think twice before they speak.
The bill also happens to be buried inside a much larger piece of legislation that quietly reshapes how Albertans can challenge their own government. Bill 23 would create a 12-month blackout period before and after provincial elections for starting or continuing a citizen initiative petition. It would also repeal deadlines for the government to call a referendum for any future successful policy or constitutional petition. A citizen petition that gathers enough signatures no longer comes with any deadline for the government to actually act on it. A petition delayed long enough is a petition that never matters.
Alberta already has laws against fraud and election interference. The question is whether a province needs a new law that bans a broad category of political expression, with vague definitions and no protections for satire or parody, enforced by fines that would bankrupt most individuals.
Opposition parties have indicated tentative support for the bill, which is unsurprising.
The deepfake provisions will probably pass. They’ll sit on the books alongside the citizen petition restrictions, the removed referendum deadlines, and the expanded government oversight of the signature verification process. Bill 23 gives the Alberta government more tools to control what citizens say about their politicians and fewer obligations to respond when citizens try to hold those politicians accountable.
Germany seeks to restrict stays abroad for men of fighting age – Berliner Zeitung
RT | April 7, 2026
German men who remain abroad for more than three months without prior approval may start facing penalties under a military-related legal requirement, according to the Berliner Zeitung.
The rule obliges men of fighting age, between the ages of 17 and 45, to obtain permission before extended stays abroad. It came into force on January 1, 2026, but April is when the first three-month period expires and enforcement may begin, the outlet has said.
Germany is in the process of a massive military buildup, with plans to spend reportedly more than €500 billion (around $580 billion) on defense by 2029. German officials have set 2029 as the deadline for the armed forces to be “war-ready” for a potential conflict with Russia.
Moscow has repeatedly denied any plans to attack NATO as “nonsense” and ridiculed Western politicians over such claims. In February Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that Russia had “no reason” to attack the EU or NATO unless attacked first.
The new requirement, which was introduced under the Military Service Modernization Act and reportedly largely went unnoticed, previously applied only during a “state of tension” or a “state of defense,” defined as situations of heightened external threat or armed attack. Since the amendment took effect, it now applies at all times, including in peacetime. The Defense Ministry said the measure is intended to maintain a reliable registry of individuals eligible for military service.
Several EU states, including Germany, have recently moved to reintroduce conscription. The German government has said the armed forces should grow from around 180,000 active soldiers to more than 260,000 by 2035.
Students staged protests in late March in German cities against Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s plans to expand military service. Demonstrators accused the government of preparing forced mobilization, with some chanting that “Merz should go to the front himself and risk his own life.”
The new rules faced criticism from the MPs in the Bundestag, with the Green Party’s security policy spokeswoman, Sara Nanni, telling Die Welt on Sunday that “citizens have a right to know quickly whether they are required to report, and if so, what their reporting obligations are.”
When addressed about the backlash by Politico on Tuesday, a spokesman for the German Defense Ministry said that it “is currently developing detailed provisions to allow for exemptions from the approval requirement, also with a view to avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.”
According to the ministry, approvals to leave the country are expected to be issued in all cases as long as military service remains voluntary in Germany.
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The toxic legacy of nuclear weapons testing serves as a stark warning of the danger these weapons pose
By Scott Ritter | RT | March 11, 2021
Millions of people suffer and die from the effects of radiation exposure from decades of nuclear weapons testing. Their experience should give serious pause to those who continue to embrace the viability of a nuclear deterrent.
A dust storm originating in the Sahara Desert swept across parts of Spain, France, the UK, and Ireland last month. In addition to bringing a red tinge to the sky, the dust caused a slight, yet noticeable, spike in radiation in the areas it reached. This radiation spike was caused by the presence of cesium-137, a radioactive isotope produced through the nuclear fission of uranium-235 in nuclear weapons. A legacy of French nuclear weapons testing that occurred in Algeria during the 1960s, the cesium-137 contamination is a reminder that while the testing of nuclear weapons may have been halted for the time being, the consequences of these tests live on through the poisoning of the planet mankind calls home.
The Saharan radioactive dust cloud is but the most recent visible phenomenon of a plague that has infected much of the world. … continue
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