As the world is undergoing one of the most serious economic crises in its contemporary history, billionaires have never made so much money. The reasons? They are shareholders in new technologies and pharmaceutical industry.
In January 2020, the Lebanese judiciary requested legal aid from Switzerland concerning ‘suspicious’ money transfers. In January 2021, it was the turn of the Swiss justice system to apply to Lebanon concerning a possible embezzlement of funds “to the detriment of the Central Bank of Lebanon”.
The Russian President hates popular revolts in the former USSR. Whether it is Belarus today, or Armenia in 2018. The Velvet Revolution brought Nikol Pachinian to power. However, the current Prime Minister dares to criticise the Eurasian Economic Union, built around Russia, and is not indifferent to the sirens of the European Union.
Indicted for four rapes and banned from leaving French territory, the preacher set up a training and research center in October providing courses in ethics, humanism and … feminism. First recruit: Yacob Mahi, sentenced in Belgium in 2019 for “deeds of morality” and given a three-year suspended prison sentence.
While the French Ministry of the Interior has just renewed Hani Ramadan’s ban on staying in France (a ban which dates back to April 2017), the Director of the Islamic Center of Geneva (Tariq Ramadan’s brother) replies by questioning the official version of the 9/11 attacks!
Preparing a trip to Syria or Somalia can now earn you years in prison in Switzerland. Bern is developing preventive justice and wants to take on “potential terrorists”, like some sci-fi movies which say that in the future the police will not only arrest the perpetrators of a heist, but will have the right to intercept the people who brought up the idea to commit a robbery…
Under the leadership of the new head of the World Islamic League, Mohammed Bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, a close to the crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, Saudi Arabia announced in January that it would separate from the mosques it control in the West and which have long served to spread the Wahhabi ideology. But five months later, Riyadh did not find takers. And this Saudi disengagement raises fears of a takeover of these mosques by even more radical actors. The mosques in question are coveted by some disreputable states, such as Erdogan’s Turkey, and by non-state groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafist movements.
In his book Tariq Ramadan, History of an imposture, published by Flammarion, our colleague Ian Hamel devotes to the Islamologist François Burgat a very edifying chapter on the relationships of the author of Understanding political Islam with the Muslim Brotherhood and their Qatari sponsors.
Good leaves:
On November 13, 1995, an Egyptian diplomat on duty for the UN was shot six times in Geneva. He was investigating the war treasure of the Muslim Brotherhood allegedly managed by Said Ramadan, Hassan al-Banna’s son-in-law. A quarter of a century later, the case has just experienced an incredible turnaround: the Swiss federal court has just ordered the release of the alleged killer, arrested in 2018!
While Taiwan has alerted the WHO to the emergence of the virus and the possibility of human-to-human transmission, several weeks before China, the UN specialized agency continues to boycott Taipei, at Beijing’s request.