Greece's new minister of interior, former far-right activist Makis Voridis. Not "allegedly" and without a hint of exaggeration.

THREAD

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#Iran's echo chamber at work

@JZarif describes Qassem Soleimani as a "national hero" who defeated ISIS

Iran apologists/lobbyists begin

So just saw a clip with CNN pundits claiming Nigeria investing in rail transport with Chinese funding is nothing but a white elephant project. It would have been better spent to build schools. Since when did the media decide what Nigeria should and shouldn't do with its money?

Ive seen a Focus on Kenya Exclusive on CNN. They spent 4 minutes talking about Kenya's mobile banking system, which is the most sophisticated in the world, and spent an hour on Kenya's Kibera slums. When terrorist struck Nairobi mall CNN was unabash in showing images of blood

and gore of dead victims repeatedly all through the day. This will never happen in a similar style terror attack anywhere in the West. It’s time to take a hard look at the role of the liberal media in perpetuating a horribly simplistic and stereotypical portrayal of Africa

At what point do we stop being dormant?. At what point do we fight back to salvage our self esteem and integrity as Africans? They did not condemn the U.S invasion of Iraq that has forever changed the middle east.

Iranian Reformist Front (Jebheye Eslathalabane Iran) was officially founded yesterday in Jamaran, Khomeini's historic house near Tehran.

The founding meeting elected Behzad Nabavi as an interim head since he is oldest.

And also 5 people as a committee to draft the IRF's by-laws

The five are:

1- Outspoken Tehran MP @mah_sadeghi
2- Faraj Komijani, politician with a base in an official teachers union
3- Ali Bagheri (low-key politician)
4- @MansooriAzar , noted reformist politician
5- Rouhani's ex-VP @mowlaverdi

Some more pictures of the meeting.

The next meeting of the group is on Wednesday and will be held virtually.

The top question remains whether and who (and how many candidates) to run for the coming #IranElections2021

The founding statement says the reformists will run a single candidate agreed by all reformist parties but only if elections are to be "free, legal, competitive, just and constitutional"... which is obviously not what's going to happen!

The founding statement also includes big demands like call for a referendum to revise the constitution. But as usual these big words aren't followed by any actions.

💥🇸🇪The Sweden “Problem” SOLVED!🇸🇪💥

Or, how does a biased world rid itself of the best example of a non-lockdown control for its horrible lockdown experiment?

Simple! CHANGE THE DATA.

Of course we all know Sweden has been a battleground regarding its mild voluntary lockdown strategy versus the heavy lockdowns of most of the EU. Inconvenient graphs like this one are quite a thorn in Team Lockdown’s side. Sweden fewer deaths/M, much better quality of life.

When I did some analysis in the Spring and Fall, I looked at Oxford’s stringency index as a proxy for lockdown severity. And sure enough Sweden was significantly lower stringency than all other EU countries.

Here is a plot tracking stringency for the UK, Finland Norway and Sweden. I added Norway and Finland because Team Lockdown loves to reply to Sweden threads with “but Norway but Finland”! When I plotted this in October we see Sweden’s Spring stringency was comparatively low.

But then I just happened to plot this again yesterday. What the heck? Sweden is no longer a mild-response country! It is only slightly less stringent than the UK! And the “but Norway Finland” argument is now moot! Look how much less stringent they’ve been!