Bobby Sands, a young Irish Catholic that joined the IRA in 1972, died as a hunger-striker just 40 years ago protesting against Britain’s rule in Northern Ireland. Also pope John Paul II tried unsuccessfully to intervene to end the hunger strike.

The Hungarian Fidesz party has quit the European People's Party group. The EPP, together with the Socialists and Liberals, had already been voting against Hungary over the last two years. The EPP is systematically betraying its Christian values. Now Orban's withdrawl makes things clearer and just may be the precursor to the birth of a new, more coherent group.

China is way ahead of the game:  it is the first major emerging power to introduce a vaccine passport. Though not the first ever of its kind, China is advocating a system of standard recognition around the world. What is the flip side? It’s yet another means of totalitarian control.

The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, says that "we are entering an era of pandemics." Even after Covid is over, nevertheless "the risk is still there" of further global disease. Indeed, pandemics - like the Spanish and Asian flus - have always dwelt among us. But they have never disrupted human existence as they do now. “Phobocracy” is just the latest development in governance: whoever is capable of terrorising the masses is now in charge.

While hundreds of illegal immigrants have been arriving on Italian shores, the U.N. is pointing out the seriousness of illegal human trafficking, a business that earns transnational criminal organisations upwards of around $10 billion annually. Trafficking is not just tied to Mediterranean crossings, but to complex networks with dozens of bases set up along land routes spanning thousands of kilometres and with activities ranging from document forgery to marketing operations. What's more, human traffickers see themselves as do-gooders: “I make dreams come true,” says Kabir, a Pakistani trafficker. And a Siberian trafficker named Alexsandr says, "Moses was the first smuggler in history, I am just like him". 

If a private corporate and commercial entity, lacking in democratic legitimacy and public authority, meddles forcefully in the exercise of rights guaranteed by national and international legal systems, it means that serious questions should be posed regarding the nature of the Internet and rules needed to prevent further showdowns by Big Tech. With Trump, whose accounts were recently blocked by Facebook and Twitter, a debate is now underway concerning the role of social media networks. Are they censors or publicists? Watchdogs or publishers? Even a publicly appointed authority would be risky, though the phenomenon must be tackled with moral equilibrium.

There is a pandemic psychosis that is no longer justified by the public health emergency now behind us.  Nonetheless, fears about the future and returning to normal life are now characteristics of gerontocratic and infertile societies that have practically lost their vital thrust. COVID induced panic has become both a symptom and a driver of those societies’ decadence.

Six out of ten Christian voters today would vote for Trump. Polls from the Pew Research Center also show that the current president has managed to move the Catholic electorate from the Dem Party to the GOP. Despite the protests and Covid, the numbers remain similar to 2016, not only because he “defends our ideas” but because he “has courage, does what he promises”.

On Sunday, July 12, Poland will hold the second round of its presidential election. The contenders are the incumbent President Andrzej Duda and Rafał Trzaskowski. The stakes are enormous: the election will decide whether Poland will remain a nation faithful to traditional values centered on the family or become another country subjected to the dictatorship of the politically correct.

Fear-mongering propaganda uses the spectre of the 1918 Spanish flu to support the hypothesis of a dangerous second wave of COVID-19. This is irrational. It portrays the coronavirus as a force of nature beyond our control. The concept of a "second wave" in epidemiology is an imperfect one. It would be more worthwhile to study how the virus "hides out" in host animals and find ways to eradicate it.

The figures decreased in April, surely due to bad weather and the pandemic. However, in May numbers of illegal immigrants entering the EU from various Mediterranean routes tripled compared to the previous month. From January to May, 5,500 cases have been recorded, virtually triple the number for the same period in 2019. Frontex has reported this, but individual countries are not responding

Greece and Malta are flagrantly rejecting illegal immigrants, by taking them back to the coasts of Turkey and Libya and leaving them there. Unlike Italy, Greece and Malta are fighting against human trafficking, Malta in cooperation with the Libyan coast guard, whose primary sponsor is still Italy.