"Instant Suspendu"

THE DAPHNE PROJECT

Six months ago, Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was brutally killed by a car bomb just meters from her home. The investigation into her killing is ongoing, but there is little doubt that she was murdered because of her work. With a brazen, unapologetic and uncompromising style, she denounced corruption, nepotism, clientelism, and all kinds of criminal behaviors in her tiny EU member state.

A group of 45 journalists representing 18 news organizations from 15 countries picked up Daphne’s work after it was abruptly halted by her gruesome death on the doorstep of Europe. For five months they kept digging — poring over her findings, gathering documents, talking to sources — to try to get to the bottom of the many leads the formidable woman left behind.

The Daphne Project was coordinated and led by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based organization established specifically to continue the work of killed, imprisoned, or otherwise incapacitated journalists.

Spain's terrorist "justice" and Iran's terrorist police

Among the politicians facing charges of rebellion is Jordi Sanchez, the latest candidate put forward by Catalan lawmakers to become leader of the region. Supreme court judge Pablo Llarena refused last week to release him from jail and he faces up to 25 years on charges of rebellion, marking the latest of four unsuccessful attempts to elect a new leader. If a new leader is not named before the end of May, Catalonia will be forced to call another election.

Shocking video footage of a young woman being wrestled to the floor by Iranian “morality police” because her hijab was loose has sparked outrage after it was posted online.

I hardly can believe that the war criminal Bashar al-Assad will be not arrested

Military help over the past three years from Russia and Iran, which also backs Lebanon’s Hezbollah group and Shi’ite Muslim militias in Iraq, has allowed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to crush the rebel threat to topple him.

For the parent of a murdered Syrian child, the current western focus on the exact method of murder must feel strange. As if Assad was well within his rights to slaughter innocents using regular bombs, and his only offence was to use chlorine or sarin, inflicting a death so painful the footage is unbearable to watch. So unless there’s a plan for action once guilt is established, demanding an investigation sounds a lot like an excuse to do nothing in the hope that soon we’ll all be talking about something else.

Syria will be one of the battlefields, most likely the key battlefield, in which that confrontation plays itself out. As clashes between Israel and Iran mount, it is hard to see this White House staying out of the fight.

Tell your MEP: Stop Copyright Censorship

MEPs on the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties committee​ are about to cast crucial votes on rules attacking the very foundation of the web.

What’s a carbon tax?

A carbon tax is a fee imposed on the burning of carbon-based fuels (coal, oil, gas). More to the point: a carbon tax is the core policy for reducing and eventually eliminating the use of fossil fuels whose combustion is destabilizing and destroying our climate.

A carbon tax is a way — the only way — to make users of carbon fuels pay for the climate damage caused by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If set high enough, it becomes a powerful monetary disincentive that motivates switches to clean energy across the economy, simply by making it more economically rewarding to move to non-carbon fuels and energy efficiency.

"Double Bind?"

How a secret Russian airlift helps Syria's Assad

Private Russian military contractors are being sent on clandestine flights to Syria, plane-tracking data shows. And a trail of documents reveals how aircraft from the West end up in the hands of those on U.S. blacklists.

Russian authorities have angrily denied that “Novichok,” a substance blamed by the British authorities for poisoning a former Russian military intelligence officer in the United Kingdom, has ever existed. But new evidence unearthed in Russia shows not only that an entire group of substances called Novichok did indeed exist, but that some was obtained by criminals after being produced in a government lab as late as 1994 — and has since killed at least two people.

The funds Hungary gets from the EU are channelled to Orban’s cronies

The funds Hungary gets from the European Union, say opposition politicians, are often channelled to Mr Orban’s cronies, including his son-in-law and the mayor of his home village, nurturing a new class of oligarchs. (They deny it.) The health-care and education systems are in decline, especially outside the capital. Hungary has the fifth-lowest life expectancy in the EU, at 76.2 years—lower than Albania’s 78.5

Czechs discover hidden film record of Stalin’s antisemitic show trial

For decades, events surrounding the revolutionary tribunal that resulted in the execution of Rudolf Slánský, general secretary of the Czechoslovak party, and 10 other defendants was shrouded in mythology – with most visual and verbal evidence apparently lost to posterity. But an event that has fascinated historians could soon be seen in graphic detail after footage and audio recording of the 1952 trial was found.

Dozens killed in suspected chemical attack on Syrian rebel enclave

Dozens of people have been killed in what local medics say was a toxic gas attack on the besieged town of Douma near Damascus. Videos and images showed bodies of dead children and other family members, some foaming at the mouth.

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“There is no such thing as a good war and a bad war. Nothing, but nothing, can justify the use of such instruments of extermination on defenceless people and populations,” he said at the end of a Mass in St Peter’s Square.