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Death rates for Americans between 25 and 44 years old jumped 71.2% in just eleven years, rising from about 140 deaths per 100,000 people in 2010 to 239 per 100,000 by 2021. No other age group came anywhere close to that surge. Overdoses, suicides, car crashes, and chronic diseases appearing at increasingly younger ages are now cutting down people in the prime of their lives.

Steven H. Woolf, a physician and researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, published the analysis in The Milbank Quarterly. He combined data from the United Nations, the CDC, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and a U.S. mortality database to show how far American life expectancy has fallen behind the rest of the developed world, and increasingly, much of the developing world too.

By 2023, U.S. life expectancy ranked 38th among countries with populations over 1 million, trailing not just Western Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia but also Chile, Costa Rica, Slovenia, Israel, South Korea, and several Persian Gulf nations. Sixty countries had a lower risk of a person dying before age 40 than the United States did. That gap didn’t open overnight. It has been widening since the 1990s, and it sped up sharply after 2010.

How Researchers Tracked the Rising Death Rates

Woolf built this analysis by comparing decades of death records rather than running a new clinical trial or survey. He pulled data from the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the U.S. Mortality Database, the CDC’s death-records database known as WONDER, and OECD data covering 16 other wealthy countries, including Canada, Japan, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. He tracked age-specific death rates from 1999 through 2023, sorted into five groups: infants, youth ages 1 to 24, young adults 25 to 44, middle-aged adults 45 to 64, and adults 65 and older.

A separate part of the study looked at all 50 states from 1941 onward, matching each year of life expectancy data to the sitting governor’s political party to see whether state policy choices lined up with health outcomes over time.

What’s Driving the Rise in Death Rates Among Young Americans

Drug overdoses top the list. Among adults 25 to 44, the overdose death rate rose sevenfold after 1999, from about 7.7 per 100,000 to more than 54 per 100,000, and surpassed circulatory diseases (such as heart disease and stroke) in 2015 to become the leading cause of death in that age group. Suicide rates for this same group are higher than in any other age bracket and climbed more than 40% between 2000 and 2023. Homicides rose 75.5% between 2014 and 2021, and deaths from car crashes and other transportation accidents rose 43.5% over that same stretch.

What surprised even close followers of these trends is how much of the damage now comes from disease rather than injury. Deaths from diabetes and other metabolic and hormone-related illness rose nearly a quarter between 2010 and 2019 among young adults. Deaths tied to liver damage from drinking more than doubled between 2010 and 2023. Deaths from alcohol-related mental health disorders more than tripled in that same window. Even high blood pressure, historically a problem of later adulthood, saw its death rate more than double among 25- to 44-year-olds between 2000 and 2023.

Middle-aged adults, 45 to 64, saw many of the same patterns: rising deaths from drug overdoses, liver damage from drinking, and diseases of the brain and nervous system, along with a COVID-19 death rate that nearly doubled between 2020 and 2021 even after vaccines became available. Older adults largely avoided these steep increases, though deaths from brain and nerve diseases doubled between 2000 and 2023, and deaths from endocrine disorders and suicide also climbed.

Infographic by StudyFinds

Where U.S. Life Expectancy Has Fallen the Furthest

National averages hide some brutal local realities. Comparing individual states to countries with similar life expectancy, Woolf found that Hawaii, the top-performing state, matched life expectancy in Western European countries like Sweden and Ireland. Mississippi, by contrast, resembled Libya, Venezuela, Belarus, and Syria in 2019. Conditions worsened after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. By 2021, life expectancy in West Virginia and Mississippi matched Bulgaria, Bangladesh, and Iraq, and fell below North Korea and Syria. Life expectancy was higher in Palestine and Iran than in nine U.S. states, including Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi.

Woolf’s review of state data going back to 1941 found that states led by Republican governors tended to see life expectancy stagnate or decline, a pattern that became especially visible after 2010 and turned into what Woolf calls a “natural experiment” during the COVID-19 pandemic. States’ sharply different decisions on masking, business closures, and vaccination, he writes, could be measured in death counts within weeks. Red states, the analysis notes, suffered the largest COVID-era drops in life expectancy, a pattern that held up even after researchers accounted for other factors like poverty rates and existing health conditions.

Other researchers cited in the review, who looked at generational patterns rather than state policy, found that Americans born after 1970 had higher death rates from heart disease, cancer, and injury-related causes than earlier generations. They concluded that the current stall in U.S. life expectancy stems from “multilayered social, biological, and generational forces.”

Why America’s Death Rates Keep Climbing

Woolf’s analysis lays out five broad categories behind America’s health disadvantage: a health care system without universal coverage, riskier individual behaviors like higher calorie consumption and firearm ownership, greater income inequality and poverty, a built environment that favors cars over walking and green space, and public policies that put less emphasis on collective welfare than peer nations do. None of these explanations are new, but the paper argues that treating overdoses, suicides, and chronic disease as separate problems misses the bigger picture: they are symptoms of the same underlying neglect.

That’s the sharpest point in the paper, and probably the one worth sitting with. Other wealthy countries didn’t stumble into longer lives by accident. They built universal health coverage, stronger safety nets, and tighter consumer and environmental protections decades ago, and it shows up in their citizens’ death certificates today. America’s problem was never a shortage of ideas for fixing this. It’s a shortage of political will to act on them, and until that changes, the gap between how long Americans live and how long people in dozens of other countries live looks likely to keep growing.

Original article: studyfinds.com

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When a plurality of Canadians voted for Mark Carney’s Liberal Party in 2025, their hope was a leader who would protect and preserve Canadian values from the American onslaught of Donald Trump. Many explicitly rejected Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives because they felt his right-wing, anti-worker values were too closely aligned with the U.S. Republican Party.

So it might disappoint Canadians to know that Mark Carney is not only continuing Justin Trudeau’s controversial labour relations regime, but quickly expanding his attack upon the working class, couching in it neutral buzzwords like “modernization” all while making it clear that the goal is to make the capitalist class happy by assuring them Canadian workers have fewer rights than they used to.

You don’t have to take my word for it; you can see the doublespeak from key members of the Carney cabinet. First up is Minister of Jobs and Families (remember, Carney refuses to have a real Minister of Labour) Patty Hajdu, who went onto the CBC to defend her government’s attack on the right to strike. Puzzlingly, Hajdu suggested that while Carney supports strike rights, their new legislation will seek to address the five per cent of cases where strike action becomes disruptive. But herein lies the trick that Hajdu even admits: collective bargaining works, because 95 per cent of the time, there are no labour stoppages. That five per cent number? Hajdu is effectively saying that she wants workers to have the ‘right’ to strike, so long as they don’t use it in the five per cent of cases they currently do. A right that exists so long as it isn’t exercised, in other words.

Indeed, more candid reporting from CTV confirmed that Carney’s objective is to go even farther than Trudeau and Stephen Harper: to not only use back-to-work legislation, but propose new legislation that “will be aimed at introducing binding mediation before strike action is taken.” This is a shocking escalation of anti-labour policy, even for the already right-wing Mark Carney. The reason is even more chilling as per CTV:

Industry’s message to the government was that its traditional tool to use for binding arbitration, Section 107 of the Canadian Labour Code, can only be applied too late in the labour dispute process and from its perspective, does not adequately prevent the damage caused from a work stoppage.

Put another way, corporations feel the government’s anti-labour tools aren’t strong enough, and that the only way to ensure investors are happy is to stop strikes before they can even manifest. But this defeats the whole purpose of strikes: they are indeed rare, but when they do happen, they must be disruptive to enact vital economic victories that benefit union members and the wider working class. This is something Avi Lewis and the NDP made clear in strong opposition to Carney’s union-busting scheme. If Carney and his capitalist buddies argue that strikes can only happen when they cause zero economic disruption, they are effectively calling for an abolition of the right to strike in practice.

This focus on pleasing investors was the central and explicit concern of  Minister of Transport Steven MacKinnon. In a discussion with Rosemary Barton, MacKinnon parroted Hajdu’s insistence that while the right to strike still exists, workers better not use it: “It harms investment, harms employment, maybe even particularly in unionized environments. So we need a better framework for getting to agreements between employers and their employees.”

Again, the crux of the Carney argument is that workers’ rights are bad for business. And that if any company fears a union could strike for better wages, improved working conditions, and fair and equitable treatment, that would hurt the bottom line, and they might be less likely to invest. So, for Carney to entice the Trump-aligned American capitalists that Canadians wanted protection from, he must crush the workers under his boot, including their basic right to withhold their labour as guaranteed by the Charter.

Carney may say he opposes Trump, but his ideal Canada is a Republican dream of an anti-union southern Red state. The man elected to save Canada? He’s the one dissolving it from the inside for the benefit of capitalists, including American businessmen who supported Trump. Once Carney’s done selling away our rights and our infrastructure with the help of American banks like Morgan Stanley, he’ll be fine. But Canadians will be left picking up the pieces of a Trumpified Canada for generations.

Original article: ricochet.media

L’Impero ottomano e in minor misura seppur ugualmente lo stato turco fondato da Mustafà Kemal, detto Atatürk, ovvero padre dei turchi, era ed è una nazione formata da molti popoli, ma non cosmopolita, bensì polietnica, la turchicità e la lingua turca ne rappresentavano e ne rappresentano la sintesi

Segue nostro Telegram.

La società polietnica turca, come spiega il professor Şükrü Hanioğlu[1], non è una società multietnica in senso occidentale, ogni comunità etnica e ogni gruppo linguistico, pur connotata da una forte identità sociale e culturale, è estranea al multiculturalismo tutto confondente di matrice anglo – statunitense, così come allo stesso modo è priva di una dimensione nazionalistica, essendo l’appartenenza alla nazione turca parte dell’identità.

La turchicità e la lingua turca dunque si sostanziano come collante di una pluralità etnica, linguistica e religiosa che ha tutto l’interesse a coltivare la propria specificità e a perpetuarsi, pur dentro la cornice della nazione turca.

Questa peculiare forma di plurime identità, etniche ma non nazionali e ancor meno nazionaliste, è stata in parte trasformata nel corso della seconda metà del Novecento dall’introduzione dall’esterno, leggasi ingerenza statunitense, dentro alcune comunità, massimamente quella curda, di un nazionalismo funzionale a propagandare il separatismo etnico, in ultima istanza una risorsa dell’imperialismo in funzione di contenimento delle spinte di autonomia e sovranità della Turchia, tuttavia la recente scelta dei separatisti curdi di deporre le armi e rientrare nell’alveo della comunità nazionale turca, accettando di porsi sul piano della democrazia politica, rappresenta un’ulteriore vittoria della Turchia, intesa ad assolvere un fondamentale ruolo nella costruzione del nuovo ordine mondiale multipolare e sempre meno legata agli interessi euro – atlantici, anche in ragione del sempre più acceso confronto con l’entità statuale sionista, che rischia, per colpa di Tel Aviv, di degenerare in un pericolosissimo conflitto armato dagli imprevedibili sviluppi tanto per l’Asia Occidentale, quanto per il Mediterraneo.

La storia della civiltà turca si dipana dai tempi del sovrano turco Osman figlio di Ertuğrul, diventato sultano di un impero che aveva in Bursa la sua capitale e da lui prenderà il nome di ottomano, il tutto, siamo nel 1299, mentre Dante Alighieri ancora fa politica a Firenze.

Osman è seguito dal figlio Orhan, dal nipote Murad, in successiva continuità con Bayezid, detto Ylderim, ovvero il Fulmine, sebbene sconfitto da Timur e Lan, ovvero Tamerlano, quindi Mehmet I e infine Murad II. Tutti e sei questi primi sultani riposano a Bursa, cuore anatolico anche della Turchia moderna, ospitati in “turbe”, ovvero mausolei, di incomparabile bellezza artistica e architettonica islamica.

La svolta più significativa avviene con Mehmet II Fatih, figlio di Murad II e settimo sovrano, detto appunto il Conquistatore, che riposa a Istanbul – Costantinopoli, avendola conquistata e avendone fatto il cuore di un impero che per diversi secoli ha rappresentato una assoluta potenza presente su tre continenti.

Da poco più di un secolo la Turchia è una repubblica kemalista, ovvero orientata al coinvolgimento popolare delle lavoratrici e dei lavoratori nei destini della nazione, con una profonda tradizione di autentica emancipazione femminile.

Il partito patriottico Vatan, guidato dal marxista Doğu Perinçek, un pragmatico rivoluzionario capace nella sua lunga militanza di poter vantare profonde e durature amicizie con Mao Ze Dong, Deng Xiaoping e Kim Il Sung, si avvia a tenere ai primi di gennaio 2027 il suo prossimo congresso e ha nel frattempo pubblicato le tesi congressuali, come sempre di grande rilevanza e di profondo interesse.

Nel complesso nelle tesi per l’imminente 17° Congresso, pubblicate nel numero di TEORİ rivista teorica del Partito di settembre 2026, Vatan ribadisce la sua adesione al socialismo scientifico e al marxismo, intensi non dogmaticamente, ma creativamente, alla ricerca di una sintesi teorica originale.

Il congresso intenderà ovviamente procedere al rafforzamento organizzativo interno e al radicamento sul territorio, forte di una avanguardia militante di quadri politicamente consapevoli e ben formati, non disdegnando tuttavia una attenta valutazione delle forze in campo a partire dal ritorno al kemalismo e all’antimperialismo del CHP, ovvero il socialdemocratico Partito Popolare Repubblicano, il quale, ora guidato da Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, intende ripristinare, abbandonando le derive atlantiste degli ultimi anni, la centralità del patriottismo repubblicano e l’impegno per l’uguaglianza dei cittadini, con un intervento riequilibratore dello stato.

Al proposito Vatan rilancia la necessità di politiche sociali, proponendo il blocco triennale degli affitti e l’istituzione di un tribunale speciale contro la corruzione, con processi rapidissimi e confisca dei beni dei corrotti.

Vatan si propone di elaborare una legge esplicita per vietare le organizzazioni e la propaganda LGBT, intese non come strumenti di salvaguardia dei diritti individuali, che il Partito rispetta e non discute, ma come pesante strumento eterodiretto di intromissione atlantista nelle scelte della Turchia, oltreché come uno strumento di alienazione naturale dei generi biologici e di frantumazione della famiglia, cellula fondamentale di resistenza della nazione lavoratrice.

Il Partito dichiara inoltre di combattere, oltre all’ideologia LGBT, il cosmopolitismo e il femminismo di matrice neoliberale.

Le tesi ammoniscono altresì che l’avanguardia rappresenta pur sempre una minoranza ed è dunque chiamata a non isolarsi dalle masse, altrimenti tenderebbe inevitabilmente a trasformarsi in una struttura di potere separata.

Vatan riconosce nell’Eurasia e in particolare nell’alleanza strutturata tra Turchia, Russia, Cina e Iran il cuore della costruzione del nuovo ordine mondiale multipolare. Viene formulata una critica radicale all’eurocentrismo del XIX e del XX secolo, accusato di aver intrappolato la sinistra occidentale in una pesante autoreferenzialità che le impedisce di capire la nuova fase storica e l’avvento del multipolarismo.

Le tesi congressuali criticano duramente la cosiddetta “coscienza di sinistra”, sia nella sua versione liberal e genderista di matrice compromissoria, socialdemocratica e in ultima analisi atlantista, sia nella sua versione massimalista e spesso violenta, definita “rozza e settaria”, ispirata a un ribellismo controproducente e in ultima istanza prossimo a un atteggiamento che intende imporre la dittatura di una minoranza sulla maggioranza della popolazione. Piuttosto il socialismo scientifico invita a ripensare ed agire nel solco della “coscienza dei lavoratori”, fondata sui valori morali popolari di onestà, solidarietà, rispetto del lavoro altrui e giustizia sociale.

La dimensione dell’umanità – nel duplice significato di insieme degli esseri umani e modalità di relazione – assurge a categoria del socialismo scientifico e viene richiamata in aperta contrapposizione rispetto alla precarizzazione, alla mercificazione, all’iper – individualismo in cui sono schiacciati gli esseri umani, non solo in Turchia, ma in tutte le nazioni a regime capitalistico.

Il Partito integra nel materialismo storico una lettura assolutamente innovativa delle nuove tecnologie. Si teorizza che lo sviluppo della robotica e dell’Intelligenza Artificiale non rappresenti una minaccia per il proletariato, ma la precondizione tecnica reale per la sua piena ed effettiva liberazione.

Anzi con molte ragioni Vatan legge nello sviluppo scientifico e tecnologico, come la Cina Popolare dimostra, la possibilità per la prima volta nella storia dell’umanità di edificare una reale società dell’abbondanza, riducendo progressivamente la necessità del lavoro manuale alienato e ponendo le basi materiali per l’abolizione dello sfruttamento dell’uomo sull’uomo.

Il Partito celebra anche l’origine della sua storia politica, quando tra la fine degli anni ‘60 e gli albori degli anni ‘70 il movimento Aydınlık, antesignano del Partito e oggi nome del pregevole settimanale edito dallo stesso, ha assunto una posizione, unica nel panorama turco, di critica del sistema sovietico, in posizione filo – cinese.

Tuttavia questo riannodare i fili del tempo non è frutto di un’esigenza meramente celebrativa, ma intende piuttosto riannodare il passato per guardare al presente.

Intanto il Partito ha sempre interpretato il tragico esaurirsi del campo sovietico non come il fallimento del socialismo scientifico, ma come la conferma empirica delle tesi storiche da lungo tempo espresse dalla dirigenza guidata da Doğu Perinçek, confermando come la degenerazione burocratica e il revisionismo moderno, iniziati dopo la scomparsa di Iosif Stalin dai suoi successori, abbiano inevitabilmente portato al collasso dello stato socialista e alla paurosa perdita delle conquiste popolari.

Per altro, mentre i sovietici dichiaravano prematuramente di aver realizzato il “comunismo”, cercando malamente di nascondere gli enormi limiti della loro esperienza, la Cina piuttosto non ha statalizzato forzatamente ogni aspetto della società ma, promuovendo un’economia pianificata e mista in cui la proprietà statale e quella privata coesistono, ha evitato l’ipertrofia burocratica che ha contributo alla fine dell’esperienza sovietica.

Infatti in Cina ancor oggi si lotta contro le disuguaglianze, applicando misure concrete per contrastare i processi di stratificazione in classi all’interno dello stato e della società.

Tutt’altro discorso e tutt’altra analisi conduce dunque, con molte ragioni, Vatan rispetto al cammino intrapreso in questo ultimo mezzo secolo dalla Cina Popolare, in cui nel solco di Deng Xiaoping e oggi di Xi Jinping i comunisti si sono affermati non come un “Partito-Stato” oppressivo, perché non hanno usurpato il potere dei lavoratori, ma hanno agito come nucleo dirigente di un autentico “potere popolare” in cui la dialettica tra avanguardia e masse rimane aperta, vitale e orientata verso il socialismo, senza disdegnare il fondamentale vincolo marxiano di sviluppo delle forze produttive e di accrescimento del benessere dei cittadini, con fondamentali elementi di ridistribuzione rispetto alle necessità infrastrutturali della nazione cinese e al diritto inalienabile in una società socialista a casa, scuola, istruzione, cultura, salute e lavoro, possibili solo in un quadro di eccezionale primato economico, scientifico e tecnologico, con ricadute immediatamente messe al servizio della cittadinanza.

^[1] Si rimanda al suo pregevole “Breve storia del tardo impero ottomano” (in Italia edito da Sellerio) per ogni approfondimento legato alla polietnicità dell’identità turca.

School ceilings keep falling on students’ heads across the country in the last couple of days, where such incidents are being reported on a daily basis. Shortly before classes ended for the weekend, a large piece of plaster fell from the ceiling injuring a 14-year-old student. The boy at Thermi Gymnasium by Thessaloniki was hit […]

The post School ceilings keep falling on students’ heads, injuring minors during classes appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

A powerful explosion at Motor Oil Refinery on Friday morning injured two workers very seriously and another three lighter. The explosion occurred in the premises of the refinery in Agioi Theodoroi in western Attica. According to reports, two men aged 43 and 50, were initially transported to the Corinth General Hospital where they were intubated […]

The post Powerful explosion at MOTOR OIL Refinery: One dead, one intubated in ICU appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

A British tourist’s hike in the Imbros Gorge in Sfakia turned into an adventure with a happy ending Tuesday afternoon. The 73-year-old decided to walk through the gorge, with his last contact with his wife taking place on Sunday afternoon, October 4, 2026. Since then, there had been no signs of life, and his wife, […]

The post British tourist missing in Crete located in gorge appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

Traffic bans, closed metro stations and a ban of gatherings and protest rallies are being imposed in the entire center of Greek capital Athens during the visit of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday, October 7, 2026. Following a decision of by the head of the Athens Police Directorate, all outdoor public gatherings […]

The post Rubio in Athens: Traffic and gathering bans, closed metro stations, draconian security measures appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.

On Wednesday (7 October), the largest group in the European Parliament, the European People’s Party (EPP), has scheduled a debate on a “European Parliament resolution on the need for an EU strategy to counter Islamist entryism and the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood network.”

The move follows the adoption of an EPP party resolution that treats Muslim civic engagement as inherently suspect and collective religious practice as a potential threat.

It largely mirrored the German Christian Democratic approach of criminalising Muslim civic engagement.

As Brussels-based EU expert and EUobserver’s columnist Shada Islam put it, the supposed fight against “political Islam” “places Muslim political and civic activity inside an almost exclusively security framework,” and thus “European democracy is hollowed out rather than reinforced when an entire religious or ethnic minority and its civil society are regarded as permanently suspect.”

Also, the resolution protects religious freedom for Muslims only as an individual right, explicitly stating that it seeks to ensure “equality among citizens, rather than collective claims,” leaving the collective expression of Islam unprotected and thus hollowing out the very idea of religious freedom.

As also the to be debated motion shows, it is unclear where protected religious activity ends and dangerous political activity begins.

Islamophobic conspiracies

The notion of “Islamist entryism,” imported from France, has become a way to criminalise Muslim participation in civil society and politics.

The resolution describes it as “a political strategy of influence, progressive structuring, institutional penetration and ideological legitimisation,” which it separates from the “peaceful practice of Islam.”

But how does one tell the “good” Muslims, who engage peacefully in politics and lobby policymakers to stand up for their rights, from the bad? Or is the good Muslim simply the apolitical one, who does not stand up for the protection of their collective human rights?

If “political Islam” is a problem because it is described “as a societal project,” how does it differ from the collective efforts of Jews, Christians, and others, who also “produce collective norms,” as the motion puts it?

And if “Islamist influence operates through a broad and fragmented ecosystem of associations, foundations, cultural, educational, religious, charitable, university, youth, anti-discrimination or social action structures,” something equally true of Christian, Jewish, and other religious groups, then where does the EPP draw the line between peaceful Muslim activity and Islamist activity that has to be banned?

Isn’t the claim that Muslim “community allegiances placed above common law” a typical Islamophobic allegation, familiar from the old mistrust of Jews as more loyal to a global Jewish community than to the nation-state?

Is this the old antisemitism in new “Muslim” clothes?

Indeed, the motion lists a catalogue of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories: “separatist narratives, systematic victimhood, antisemitism, hatred of Israel, conspiracy narratives, challenges to secularism … may constitute markers of ideological radicalisation or Islamist influence.” They may. And what if they don’t?

Guilty until proven innocent

What follows seems to be one of the motion’s primary goals: cutting funds for Muslim and anti-racist civil society organizations such as the Forum of European Muslim Youth and Student Organisations (FEMYSO) and the European Network Against Racism (ENAR), who are both registered in the EU transparency register of Belgium and annually audited.

These CSOs are seen as a manifestation of political Islam per se even though they have denied any those connections.

And it is a form of innocence that cannot easily be proven.

The EPP motion claims that “some Islamist networks are able … to adopt the vocabulary of fundamental rights, inclusion, diversity, intercultural dialogue, anti-racism and the fight against discrimination, while promoting in other spaces logics of separation, community pressure or contestation of democratic principles.” In other words, the better integrated Muslims in Europe are, the more suspicious they may become.

Shaky legal foundations

The EPP’s motion builds on highly problematic bills, legislation and political procedures. It quotes the French ministry of the interior’s 2025 report “Muslim Brotherhood and political Islamism in France,” which has been harshly criticised.

It also cites a resolution of the French National Assembly from January 2026 that urged the European Union to add the Muslim Brotherhood to its list of terrorist organisations and to lobby for it.

The resolution was voted against by 101 members of parliament, some of whom called it “Islamophobic.” The motion also invokes the contested Austrian Symbols Act, which prohibits the symbols of non-violent organisations that are not considered illegal under domestic legislation and lumps them together with those of jihadist groups ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

A further cited motion is from the Dutch parliament in March 2026 and calls for a ban on the Muslim Brotherhood and linked organisations, but it too has no legislative relevance so far.

None of these motions or laws has outlawed “Islamist entryism” or the “Muslim Brotherhood networks.”

Yet the EPP resolution builds on exactly this shaky ground while pretending that its own motion is solid.

More importantly, the way Austria and France treat their Muslims is well documented: from the infamous, massive and racist police raids known as Operation Luxor to the French state’s Systemic Obstruction policy, which resulted in 101 government units nationwide monitoring Islam and Muslims, 24,887 Muslim organizations and businesses placed on a secret blacklist and under strict monitoring, and the closure of 718 Muslim-owned organizations and businesses, with €46m seized. There is nothing here that should be emulated elsewhere.

Crude logic

The EPP’s argument that “Hamas on the EU list of terrorist organisations historically originates from the Muslim Brotherhood movement” rests on crude logic.

Both the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D) and the secular Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), similarly considered a “terrorist organization,” have Marxist origins. Outlaw the S&D as a consequence?

Today, it is Muslims who are being surveilled, monitored and criminalised. Who is it tomorrow? If this resolution passes, life for politically conscious Muslims who are defending their right to exist in Europe will become even more difficult. And tomorrow potentially everybody’s life.

Almost 150 European politicians have become targets of AI-generated deepfake pornography, 50 of whom are MEPs. The EU’s Green party has now taken the fight to the upper echelons of EU authority to push a ban on ‘nudifying’ apps.

Research by the think tank Agora Digital Transformation (ADT), published on Monday (5 October), found that 50 MEPs have been targeted by digital platforms able to digitally strip anyone whose picture is uploaded to it. Of these, 46 are women.

Another ADT study published in September found that the chances of becoming a victim of false sexualised portrayals are one in 14 for women, against one in 500 for male politicians.

Most worryingly, a woman has no way of knowing she’s been targeted because “the harm is often unseen until it has spread,” Monday’s study read.

MEPs have rallied behind the Green party in demanding EU leaders take concrete steps to limit the influence of such software, while requiring member states to set up national authorities to roll out an effective ban on ‘nudifier’ apps from 2 December 2026.

The Green party initiated an open letter, which was endorsed by 119 MEPs from the Socialists and Democrats, liberal Renew Europe and the Left, calling on the European Commission and member states to take decisive action against AI deepfakes of women politicians.

The appeal asks to strengthen EU resolutions on AI and digital protection by requesting that the commission guide national authorities on enforcing the ban, and that there be a designated and properly resourced body in every member state ready to implement the ban from December.

This article continues, but the full version is available only to EUobserver.com subscribers. Visit account.euobserver.com/membership

The British state is compiling a list of people who criticise its own counter-terror programme. Ordinary X and Reddit users who questioned Prevent training, flagged a one-sided focus on the “far Right,” or simply criticised it have had their posts logged, stored and “investigated” by a Home Office-linked unit most of them have never heard of.

Officials spent more than a year trying to keep that database secret. They only released it after an appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office. The public was never told their feeds were being trawled.

The Standards and Compliance Unit, or StaCU, was set up in February 2024 as an “opaque” body to handle complaints about Prevent, the safeguarding scheme sold as a way to stop people becoming terrorists. Documents obtained by The Metro and released by Rights & Security International show StaCU did more than wait for formal complaints.

“Social media posts criticising government policy are being listed, monitored and investigated by officials.”

The government are supposed to serve the public rather than monitor those who disagree with them by Orwellian surveillance and snooping. https://t.co/mH62tNEkYV

— James Melville 🚜 (@JamesMelville) September 30, 2026

Between March 2024 and February 2025 it made 77 “observations” of critical online comments, most of them from X, with others from Reddit and even articles in the Guardian and the Telegraph.

Jacob Smith, Freedom of Expression and Belief Team Leader at Rights & Security International, fought for a year to force the Home Office to publish the material.

“It is shocking that the government has been trawling X and Reddit to find out who has been critiquing Prevent – and then storing that information,” he said. “You should be allowed to criticise government policy without being put on a list.”

He added: “People should be able to express their views on social media without that being catalogued in government databases.”

Many of those logged, he said, had posted without thinking “that the government might be looking at their feed and taking that data. It is in an almost private setting.”

His conclusion was blunt: “It’s a stark reminder that, in the government’s eyes, anything you share online is fair game and could go into a file forever.”

A large share of the logged posts accused Prevent training of treating the “far Right” as the main threat while skating over Islamist extremism.

One X user was recorded after calling the training “complete bullshit.” They wrote: “Anyone’s who done the prevent training knows it only talks about the far Right. Islam extremism isn’t even mentioned.”

Another poster said they “sat through Prevent training at work … and the narrative was very much that the far Right is the biggest threat.” They added: “I kid you not!”

StaCU says it tries to independently verify claims about Prevent. It managed that for only 10 percent of the posts. The unit’s parent body, the Commission for Countering Extremism, sometimes replies in public, inviting the user to submit a formal complaint.

In one case, after a post accused Prevent training of “turning a blind eye to Islam,” the Commission wrote: “Hello, we process and investigate complaints about Prevent and are interested in finding out more about the training referenced above. Please feel free to DM us, tweet us back, or make a formal complaint using this link.”

What that reply does not say is that the user’s post has already been stored in an internal government list.

It was not only anonymous accounts. Open Rights Group had a tweet recorded that said: “How data is managed and stored under the Prevent programme lacks transparency.”

Sarah Lasoye, the group’s Programme Manager for Pre-Crime, told The Metro: “Prevent has expanded far beyond its stated aim of identifying people considered ‘vulnerable to radicalisation’, and has increasingly been used to justify extensive surveillance.”

She added, “It is deeply concerning to see the Prevent duty being used to enable the monitoring of people and organisations simply because they are critical of the programme. That raises serious questions about freedom of expression and the right to dissent and protest.”

“There is also a troubling lack of transparency about what happens to the information gathered through this social media monitoring: how long it is retained, who it is shared with, and ultimately what the Government is using it for,” Lasoye urged.

Rights & Security International says organisations including Hope Not Hate and Maslaha also appear in or around the observations. The Campaign Against Antisemitism had a post logged that did not even name Prevent. It criticised police for failing to take a Hezbollah vigil seriously. A spokesperson said: “We aren’t sure whether to be flattered or concerned that StaCU has picked up a post of ours.”

The group added, “If it’s because we’ve dared to be critical of law enforcement’s lax attitude toward Islamist extremism in this country, we stand by what we said and would reiterate it for as long as it takes to bring about change. But if our post was flagged because StaCU agrees with us that police forces have failed to train their officers on what Islamist terrorism looks like and which organisations are banned, we hope that the message is being received and change is coming.”

That last point tracks a long-running complaint. Sir William Shawcross, in his 2023 review of Prevent, wrote: “The bar for what RICU includes on Islamism looks to be relatively high, whereas the bar for what is included on the extreme Right-wing is comparably low.”

Home Office figures for the year to September 2025 showed 10,293 Prevent referrals. Twenty percent were recorded as extreme right-wing ideology. Eight percent concerned Islamist extremism.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Prevent does not track people who may have criticised the programme, and nor does it target any particular community.” The department added that keeping the public safe is “our number one priority” and that Prevent has “moved more than 6,000 people away from violent ideologies since 2015.”

The documents say otherwise on the first claim. StaCU collated the posts as “open-source complaints,” stored them internally, and the Home Office refused to release the list until the Information Commissioner forced its hand. Nobody outside the unit can say who else sees the file, how long it is kept, or whether it is shared with police, platforms or other departments.

This is not an isolated compliance desk. It sits inside a growing stack of state machinery built to police speech, “narratives” and online anger.

In June, we laid out how the Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications Unit has been used to manage the mass-migration story — briefing police to cast concerned citizens as “unsympathetic thugs,” shaping family statements after migrant-linked killings, and running a higher bar for Islamism than for the so-called extreme Right.

The same week, ministers moved to give Ofcom faster powers to block “false information” during so-called crisis events — a phrase wide enough to cover any unrest the government would rather you not describe accurately.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan had already demanded a central government social-media “disinformation” unit, complaining of an “outrage economy” while knife crime, robbery and theft climbed on his watch. “If platforms fail to act, the state must have the tools to make them,” he said.

Last week Prime Minister Andy Burnham used his first United Nations speech to announce a National Centre for Information Defence — a new machine to “detect, attribute and disrupt” what ministers call hostile information attacks and to stop a “distorted and untrue narrative about Britain.”

He wrapped it in Russia, bots and “community cohesion.” Nigel Farage called it a Ministry of Truth. “Never ever trust this authoritarian Government,” he said. Defence Secretary Wes Streeting insisted: “We’re not interested in policing domestic political dissent.” Labour’s record is why that promise is already worn thin.

Police have their own version. The National Internet Intelligence Investigations team, stood up after the 2024 Southport riots, has referred more than 100 “suspicious” posts to local forces, including dozens tied to protest-related activity.

Officials describe it as “a dedicated function at a national level for exploiting internet intelligence.” Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called it “the beginning of the state controlling free speech.”

The arrest figures sit underneath all of it. Between 2021 and 2025 at least 62,199 people were arrested in Britain on suspicion of communications offences — section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, the Malicious Communications Act 1988, and the Online Safety Act’s false-communications offence.

That is roughly 34 arrests a day. Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo said speech policing is “out of control” and called the result an “Orwellian mess.” Lord Toby Young asked why authorities spend so much time “policing our tweets when they could be policing our streets.”

Prevent is sold as safeguarding. The logged posts are not bomb plots. They are workers calling official training biased, campaigners asking how data is stored, and a Jewish group complaining that police treat a banned terrorist organisation too lightly.

If that is enough to enter a Home Office database, the category of “acceptable” speech is already whatever officials decide it is on a whim.

Britain does not need another unit to hunt “untrue narratives.” It needs a government that can survive being questioned without opening a file on the questioner.

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