INTL Europe: Politics, Economics, Military- August 2021

[Plain Jane]

July's thread is here:

INTL - Europe: Politics, Economics, Military- July 2021

June's thread is here: https://www.timebomb2000.com/xf/index.php?threads/europe-politics-economics-military-june-2021.601707/ Regional Conflict in Mediterranean beginning page 74: https://www.timebomb2000.com/xf/index.php?threads/regional-conflict-brewing-in-the-mediterranean.565195/page-74...

www.timebomb2000.com

Main Coronavirus thread beginning page 1369 is here:

CORONA - Main Coronavirus thread

https://news.gab.com/2021/07/29/important-download-covid-vaccine-religious-exemption-documents-here/ IMPORTANT: DOWNLOAD COVID VACCINE RELIGIOUS EXEMPTION DOCUMENTS HERE Post authorBy Andrew Torba Post dateJuly 29, 2021 I have been receiving dozens of direct messages on Gab over the past...

www.timebomb2000.com

French police clash with anti-virus pass protesters in Paris

Thousands of people in France have turned out to protest a special virus pass by marching through Paris and other French cities.

apnews.com

French police clash with anti-virus pass protesters in Paris
By BOUBKAR BENZABAT and ELAINE GANLEYyesterday



1 of 16
Protestors hold up a banner which reads 'freedom' in French during a demonstration in Paris, France, Saturday, July 31, 2021. Demonstrators gathered in several cities in France on Saturday to protest against the COVID-19 pass, which grants vaccinated individuals greater ease of access to venues. (AP Photo/Adrienne Surprenant)

PARIS (AP) — Thousands of people protested France’s special virus pass with marches through Paris and other French cities on Saturday. Most demonstrations were peaceful, but sporadic clashes with riot police marked protests in the French capital.

Some 3,000 security forces deployed around Paris for a third weekend of protests against the pass that will be needed soon to enter restaurants and other places. Police took up posts along the Champs-Elysees to guard against an invasion of the famed avenue.

With virus infections spiking and hospitalizations rising, French lawmakers have passed a bill requiring the pass in most places as of Aug. 9. Polls show a majority of French support the pass, but some are adamantly opposed. The pass requires a vaccination or a quick negative test or proof of a recent recovery from COVID-19 and mandates vaccine shots for all health care workers by mid-September.

Across the Alps, thousands of anti-vaccine pass demonstrators marched in Italian cities including Rome, Milan and Naples for the second consecutive week. Milan demonstrators stopped outside the city’s courthouse chanting “Truth! “Shame!” and “Liberty!” while in Rome they marched behind a banner reading “Resistance.” Those demonstrations were noisy but peaceful.

For anti-vaccine pass demonstrators in France, “Iiberty” was the slogan of the day. The marches drew some 204,000 people around the country. Some 14,250 people hostile to the pass protested in Paris, several thousand more than a week ago.

Hager Ameur, a 37-year-old nurse, said she resigned from her job, accusing the government of using a form of “blackmail.”

“I think that we mustn’t be told what to do,” she told The Associated Press, adding that French medical workers during the first wave of COVID-19 were quite mistreated. “And now, suddenly we are told that if we don’t get vaccinated it is our fault that people are contaminated. I think it is sickening.”

Tensions flared in front of the famed Moulin Rouge nightclub in northern Paris during what appeared to be the largest demonstration. Lines of police faced down protesters in up-close confrontations during the march. Police used their fists on several occasions.
As marchers headed eastward and some pelted police with objects, police fired tear gas into the crowds, plumes of smoke filling the sky. A male protester was seen with a bleeding head and a police officer was carried away by colleagues. Three officers were injured, the French press quoted police as saying. Police, again responding to rowdy crowds, also turned a water cannon on protesters as the march ended at the Bastille.

A calmer march was led by the former top lieutenant of far-right leader Marine Le Pen who left to form his own small anti-EU party. But Florian Philippot’s new cause, against the virus pass, seems far more popular. His contingent of hundreds marched Saturday to the Health Ministry.
Among those not present this week was Francois Asselineau, leader of another tiny anti-EU party, the Popular Republican Union, and an ardent campaigner against the health pass, who came down with COVID-19. In a video on his party’s website, Asselineau, who was not hospitalized, called on people to denounce the “absurd, unjust and totally liberty-killing” health pass.
French authorities are implementing the health pass because the highly contagious delta variant is making strong inroads. More than 24,000 new daily cases were confirmed Friday night — compared to just a few thousand cases a day at the start of the month.
The government announcement that the health pass would take effect on Aug. 9 has driven many unvaccinated French to sign up for inoculations so their social lives won’t get shut down during the summer holiday season. Vaccinations are now available at a wide variety of places, including some beaches. More than 52% of the French population has been vaccinated.

About 112,000 people have died of the virus in France since the start of the pandemic.
___
Patrick Hermansen and Michel Euler in Paris contributed.
___
Follow all AP stories on the global pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic.

 

[Housecarl]

Just like "old times"......

Posted for fair use.....

Increasingly, Russian Activists Find Themselves Sentenced To Compulsory Medical Treatment

In recent days, several Russian political activists from Murmansk to Khabarovsk have been sentenced to compulsory psychiatric or other medical treatment. Human rights groups have been warning for years about the increased use of such Soviet-style practices as a tool against dissent.

www.rferl.org

Increasingly, Russian Activists Find Themselves Sentenced To Compulsory Medical Treatment

July 30, 2021 17:02 GMT

• By Robert Coalson
• Olga Beshlei

Protester Mikhail Kosenko spent 18 months in a psychiatric facility with a diagnosis of "paranoid schizophrenia."

MOSCOW -- On July 14, a court ordered Violetta Grudina, a former local representative for opposition leader Aleksei Navalny in Murmansk who is seeking a seat on the City Council, hospitalized and treated for COVID-19 -- despite the fact that she had no symptoms, a negative test, and a doctor who testified that she did not need treatment.

On July 26, Grudina announced a hunger strike in protest. She says hospital officials prevented her from sending forms to her staff to submit to election officials in the northwestern city. The hospital's chief doctor, Arkady Amozov, won the "primary" from the ruling United Russia party for the City Council seat that Grudina is seeking, although he is officially running as an independent.

Amozov "is illegally detaining me, hindering my candidacy, depriving me of my personal liberty and my right to seek election, and is isolating me in a COVID-19 hospital under his authority," Grudina told Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.

On July 19, a military court in Khabarovsk, some 9,500 kilometers east of Murmansk in the Russian Far East, sent Irkutsk blogger and former Navalny staffer Dmitry Nadein for compulsory psychological treatment in connection with his trial on what he contends is a baseless charge of "justifying terrorism." Nadein's family said he had been secretly transferred in mid-June from Irkutsk to Khabarovsk, more than 2,200 km away, and officials have refused to explain why he is being tried in a different region.

In April, Nadein was being held in pretrial custody when the court ordered him to undergo psychiatric evaluation. According to his defense team, he was not allowed to communicate with his lawyers during this time, and he was diagnosed as a dangerous "schizophrenic."

A court ordered that Violetta Grudina, a former representative for opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, be hospitalized.

In a higher-profile case, a court in Yakutsk on July 26 ordered colorful shaman Aleksandr Gabyshev, who has been calling for the ouster of President Vladimir Putin since 2019, to undergo "intensive" compulsory psychiatric treatment after convicting him of resisting a police officer and advocating extremism.

Grudina, Nadein, and Gabyshev are the latest among hundreds of activists who have been ordered to undergo compulsory psychiatric or other medical treatment in what the now-defunct Agora legal-defense NGO called in a 2016 report "a return to the practice of punitive psychiatry in Russia." The government listed Agora, one of Russia's leading human rights NGOs, as a "foreign agent" organization shortly after the report, and it was forced to disband later the same year.

Soviet Practice
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was widely condemned for using psychiatry to punish dissent. The Agora report, the most recent independent investigation of the topic, notes that many of those arrested during a national wave of protests following the disputed 2011 legislative elections and Putin's decision to seek a third presidential term in March 2012 were ordered to undergo such treatment. Many of them were diagnosed as "schizophrenics" and administered psychotropic drugs without being informed or giving consent.

The number of cases in which a defendant was ordered to undergo compulsory psychiatric evaluation rose from about 189,000 in 2011 -- a figure that had been fairly stable since at least 2004 -- to 216,744 in 2014, according to official statistics cited in the Agora report.

Two of the defendants in the 2012 Pussy Riot case -- Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich -- were ordered to undergo evaluation and were diagnosed with "disorders" ranging from "an active life position and a desire for self-realization" to "a categorical insistence on their own opinion," according to court documents.


SEE ALSO:Russian Teens’ Online Chat About School Massacre Leads To Forced Psychiatric Treatment

"The psychological evaluation conducted while I was in custody at the order of prosecutors found that the main traits of my personality are humanism and a desire for freedom and justice," Tolokonnikova said during her closing remarks to the court.
Ukrainian pilot Nadia Savchenko and the late prisoners' rights advocate Sergei Mokhnatkin are among other high-profile defendants who were ordered to undergo such evaluations.

Agora warned that the ability of prosecutors to request such evaluations without any justification, the documented willingness of the courts to almost uniformly grant those requests, and the near-total lack of oversight or monitoring of defendants undergoing such treatment have created a system that is ripe for politically motivated abuse.

Retired postal worker and pro-democracy activist Pyotr Trofimov, who has been granted political asylum in Finland, was arrested in 2018 on charges of failing to return equipment to a previous employer when he worked as a welder. He denies the allegations and says they were trumped up in retaliation for his protest activity.

He spent nearly a month undergoing a compulsory psychiatric evaluation.

"I was in a room for two people," he said. "We were locked in at night. There was a sink and a toilet. There was also a shower, but we were only allowed to use it once a week."

"Under the law, a court can order you to undergo an evaluation for 30 days," he added. "But if the doctors don't reach any conclusion by that time, the court can add another 30 days. And then another."

Mikhail Kosenko, a defendant in the so-called Bolotnaya protest case, spent 18 months in a psychiatric facility with a diagnosis of "paranoid schizophrenia."

"He was lost after being released from the hospital," his sister, Ksenya, told RFE/RL's Russian Service in 2015. "It took him about eight months to get back to normal."

Anna Bitova specializes in studying cognitive and neurological impairment in children. She told Current Time that people sentenced to compulsory psychological treatment are completely under the control of the facility to which they are assigned.

"You are not allowed to get up when you want, to eat when you want, to go anywhere, to wear what you want, or to do what you want," she said. "You are in de facto compulsory isolation."

In October 2014, political performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky cut off part of his ear while sitting naked on the roof of Moscow's Serbsky State Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry to protest the return of punitive psychiatric treatment in Russia.

"Armed with psychiatric diagnoses, bureaucrats in white coats cut off from society those parts that hinder him from installing a monolithic dictatorship," Pavlensky declared at the time.

Following the protest, a court ordered him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation at the Serbsky center. Doctors deemed him fit to stand trial.

Written by RFE/RL senior correspondent Robert Coalson based on reporting from Moscow by Current Time correspondent Olga Beshlei.

 

[Zagdid]

Rio Tinto readies to ship trial lithium plant to Serbia

Rio Tinto Ltd (RIO.AX) is set to ship a pilot lithium processing plant to Serbia from Melbourne in the coming weeks, the culmination of a decade's research to catapult the world's largest iron ore miner into battery minerals.

www.reuters.com

Rio Tinto readies to ship trial lithium plant to Serbia
Reuters August 1, 202110:19 AM EDT Last Updated 5 hours ago

A sample of the mineral jadarite, from Rio Tinto's Jadar lithium mine in Serbia, and the chemicals it will make are displayed at its research and development hub in Bundoora, Melbourne, Australia, July 30, 2021. REUTERS/Melanie Burton

MELBOURNE, Aug 2 - Rio Tinto Ltd (RIO.AX) is set to ship a pilot lithium processing plant to Serbia from Melbourne in the coming weeks, the culmination of a decade's research to catapult the world's largest iron ore miner into battery minerals.

The work, undertaken at a science hub on the outskirts of Melbourne, has found a way to economically extract lithium from jadarite, a mineral that has only been found in a Serbian valley.

Rio last week hit the go button on the $2.4 billion project that will diversify the producer of iron ore, copper, aluminium and speciality minerals into a top ten lithium producer, just as demand from electric vehicle makers booms.

"It’s not a huge mine but from a lithium perspective, it’s going to be the largest producer in Europe for at least ten years and bring lithium to the market at scale," Sinead Kaufman, Chief Executive of Rio's Minerals division, told reporters.

Four 40-foot shipping containers of equipment will leave in coming weeks before a nine-week sail and onward river journey.

Construction is expected to begin early next year, subject to environmental approvals, with the first production from 2026.

The mine is expected to produce enough lithium to power one million electric vehicles. It will also produce boric acid, used in ceramics and batteries, and sodium sulphate, used in detergents.

Major automakers, such as BMW (BMWG.DE), Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) and leader Tesla Inc (TSLA.O), are seeking to diversify supply chains away from dominant producer China.

"We haven’t committed to any orders of yet, but we have certainly seen a lot of interest," Kaufman said.

Rio plans a material increase in research and development beyond the $260 million it spends a year, Jared Osborne, general manager of the R&D facility, said, as it accelerates ways to harness renewable energy to sustainably produce materials.

It is already researching how to make carbon-free aluminium economically in Canada and has partnerships with steelmakers, including China Baowu Steel Group, to produce green steel.

Reporting by Melanie Burton; editing by Barbara Lewis

 

[northern watch]

Belarus leader ready to invite Russian troops 'if necessary'
Belarus’ authoritarian president says he's prepared to invite Russian troops into the country, if necessary, to ensure security of both Belarus and Russia

By YURAS KARMANAU Associated Press
30 July 2021, 10:14

The Associated Press
Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko speaks during a meeting with officials in Minsk, Belarus, Friday, July 23, 2021. (Pavel Orlovsky/BelTA Pool Photo via AP)

KYIV, Ukraine -- Belarus' authoritarian president said Friday he's prepared to invite Russian troops into the country if such a move is necessary to ensure the security of both Belarus and Russia.

But, President Alexander Lukashenko said, at the moment “there is absolutely no need” to do that.

In remarks carried by the state-run Belta news agency, Lukashenko stressed that he had dealt with last year's anti-government protests without involving other countries' armed forces, but added that he would not hesitate to bring in Russian troops if necessary.

Belarus is able to quickly deploy 500,000 of its own personnel, but “if it is not enough, all Russian armed forces will be brought in,” Lukashenko said, according to Belta. “If it is necessary, we won't hesitate.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that Moscow hasn't received any official requests from Belarus to deploy troops, and the move “is possible only after an official request from the leadership of one country to the leadership of other.”

Russia and Belarus have close military and defense ties. Two Russian radar stations communicating with nuclear submarines in the Atlantic and Indian oceans and parts of the Pacific are based in Belarus. In September, the two ex-Soviet nations are scheduled to conduct large-scale joint military exercises.

Until recently, Lukashenko's government had resisted Moscow's attempts to expand military presence in Belarus and rejected requests to open an airbase and station additional troops in the country.

But amid the political crisis that unfolded in Belarus after Lukashenko's reelection to a sixth term in August 2020 was met with huge protests, Russia promised its neighbor military support and allocated a $1.5 billion loan for Belarus' ailing economy.

Lukashenko faced months of protests that were triggered by his being announced the winner of an August 2020 presidential vote that the opposition and the West saw as rigged. He responded to demonstrations with a massive crackdown that saw more than 35,000 people arrested and thousands beaten by police.

The United States and the European Union have imposed multiple sanctions targeting the Belarusian leadership and key sectors of its economy in the wake of the crisis.

Belarusian political analyst Valery Karbalevich told The Associated Press that Lukashenko's statements on Friday were a clear attempt to scare the West.

“For the first time, he threatened with the deployment of Russian troops to Belarus. However, the Kremlin is no hurry to support these initiatives," Karbalevich said.

Lukashenko has accused the West of attempting to orchestrate a revolution in the country he has ruled with an iron fist for decades and of plotting a coup, including by pressuring Belarus with sanctions. His challenger in the election fled to Lithuania and Lithuanian officials say authorities in Belarus are now flooding Lithuania's border with migrants to put that EU nation under pressure.

“They seem to seek out our sore spots. They hit primarily the export sectors of the Belarusian economy: petrochemistry, mechanical engineering, potash, and so on. But the main goal is to leave the people without pensions, salaries, benefits, education, medical care and cause discontent among Belarusians,” Lukashenko said.

The Belarusian president called for further action against the country's human rights groups, alleging that behind them are foreign masterminds, and said government pressure on independent media would continue.

“Freedom of speech that we're protecting under the constitution today has turned into extremist activities,” Lukashenko charged, urging state officials to closely control every journalist and blogger. “It's one thing to criticize the authorities. We have always took criticism adequately ... It's a different thing to call for a rebellion and massacre of those who don't support these so-called revolutionary, thuggish sentiments."

Belarusian authorities in recent weeks have ramped up the pressure against non-governmental organizations and independent media, conducting more than 200 raids of offices and apartments of activists and journalists this month alone, according to the Viasna human rights center.

The Belarusian Association of Journalists said raids and detentions targeting reporters continued Friday in Minsk and other cities. Earlier this week, the authorities declared the Polish-funded Belsat TV channel an extremist group.

A total of 28 Belarusian journalists remain in custody either awaiting trial or serving their sentences. Journalist groups on Thursday demanded that authorities give urgent hospital care to a leading journalist who has been in pre-trial detention.

—-

Associated Press writer Daria Litvinova contributed to this report from Moscow.

Belarus leader ready to invite Russian troops 'if necessary' - ABC News (go.com)

 

[northern watch]

Is Putin’s next big chance to take Ukraine now?
UkraineAlert by Mark Temnycky

Atlantic Council
TUESDAY, JUL 27, 2021

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently published an opinion essay “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” He argues that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, that Ukraine has fake borders, and that the West has established an anti-Russia project to instill fear in Ukrainians.

Putin’s saber rattling and ahistorical claims don’t seem new. He has often made these assertions. The Russian president has called the collapse of the Soviet Union a “genuine tragedy,” and he has worked hard to preserve Russia’s sphere of influence.

Some new claims in his essay, however, should be a cause for concern. While discussing the conflict in eastern Ukraine, Putin argues that Kyiv “does not need the Donbas.” He states that the “inhabitants of these regions will never accept [Western] order,” and that Ukrainian sovereignty can only be achieved by partnering with Russia.

So is Putin preparing for a new incursion into Ukraine?

Perhaps. This scenario is not as far-fetched as it may seem. In April, Russia amassed over 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s eastern border. Russian forces blockaded parts of the Black Sea, and it restricted airspace near the Russian occupied Donbas and Crimea. This snap buildup demonstrated that Moscow could mobilize its forces on short notice, and the West could do little but issue stern denouncements.

Now, Putin has another chance to strike. A new incursion may occur during the Tokyo Olympics. Over the next two weeks, millions of viewers around the world will tune in. He may use this as his window of opportunity while the world is distracted.

This would not be the first time Putin has relied on sporting events to meddle abroad. For more than a decade, Russia’s overseas adventures have coincided with various sporting events.

First it was the 2008 Beijing Olympics. On August 8, amidst the opening ceremony and all the attending hoopla, there was a devastating affair. South Ossetian separatists surrounded the Georgian city of Tskhinvali. Russian units had also advanced on the city. Heavy fighting commenced, and the international community was caught by surprise. Western leaders were slow to respond, and by the time they offered their assistance, Russia had occupied Abkhazia and South Ossetia. These regions remain occupied.

Two years later, Russia did it again. During the summer of 2010, millions of soccer fans tuned into the FIFA World Cup. 32 teams from around the world gathered for the most prestigious international award, and millions of fans anxiously watched as their national teams competed.

Meanwhile, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka had engaged in a spat with Putin over the flow of natural gas from Russia to Belarus. Russia cut its natural gas to Belarus after Minsk did not pay. This became a serious matter for the European continent as Russia exported “approximately 20 percent of its gas to Europe through Belarus.” Günther Oettinger, the European Union’s Energy Commissioner at the time, stated that the dispute between Belarus and Russia was an “attack” on the European Union. While the matter was eventually resolved, it underscored Europe’s dependency on Russian gas.

By 2012, Russia’s aggressive moves during sporting events had become entirely predictable. While the West anxiously awaited the Olympic games in London, Russia ramped up its involvement in the Syrian conflict. During the summer months, Russia sold weapons to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad which helped bolster Assad’s position over Syrian rebel forces. Then, when the Olympic games had begun, the conflict in Syria escalated. Over 100 civilians were killed on the opening day of the London Olympics, and a series of lengthy battles emerged between Assad’s government and the Syrian rebels. This escalation also forced the United Nations to pull its monitors from Aleppo out of concerns for their safety.

Russia’s most grievous offense occurred during the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Prior to the games, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had reneged his decision to sign an association agreement with the European Union and eventually fled as the country embraced Western integration

Russia had other plans. During the winter Olympics, Russia had amassed a large security force in Sochi to protect the athletes and dignitaries at the games. While the world was distracted by the games, a large unidentified military force invaded Crimea. Although these soldiers wore no military insignia, they were quickly identified as Russian. Within a matter of weeks, Russia had illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, falsely claiming that it had come to aid ethnic Russians and Russian speakers. Then, in April 2014, armed militants in Donetsk and Luhansk stormed their respective government buildings, and the Verkhovna Rada declared an anti-terrorist operation in these regions. These events led to the Donbas conflict. To this day, more than 14,000 people have died and nearly 1.3 million are displaced.

As Russia expanded its efforts in Ukraine, Putin also became fully invested in Assad’s cause. During the summer of 2016, Russian forces and advisors were deployed to assist with Assad’s Aleppo campaign. Russian troops were seen fighting alongside Assad’s forces. The Russian Federation also started reporting casualties during these battles. As the fighting intensified, the world was occupied by the 2016 Rio Olympics. This allowed the Russians to dictate the state of play on the Syrian battlefield. Assad’s forces had gained a series of advances against rebel forces, and Russia became a “decisive force” during the conflict.

Russia’s meddling was not limited to just Europe and Asia. During the 2018 FIFA World Cup, millions of soccer supporters watched as the Russian Federation hosted the competition while Russian political leaders actively worked with Libyan rebels. Russia provided economic and military assistance to rebel commander Khalifa Haftar, and the World Cup happened to coincide with the Battle of Derna. Over 30 Libyans were killed during this battle.

Given this long pattern of Russian meddling during major sporting events, Putin’s next incursion into Ukraine could coincide with the Tokyo Olympics. First, Putin’s essay on Russia and Ukraine is rather timely. We know that Putin will go to great lengths to ensure that Russia and Ukraine are unified, or to destroy Ukraine as a cohesive state. Second, the weather in eastern Ukraine favors a new Russian offensive. According to military experts, the spring in eastern Ukraine is known as mud season. This would have made it difficult for the Kremlin to move its heavy machinery into the Donbas, but with a dry summer, it is possible that Russia’s troop movement near Ukraine’s eastern border in April 2021 was a precursor to what may come. Or it could deploy more forces in the Black Sea or take the Zmiiyni Island, as analysts at the Kyiv-based Center for Defense Strategies have warned. Finally, the West has been preoccupied with the fight over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. As several European states continue to lobby against the pipeline’s completion, the United States and Germany recently announced a joint statement on Nord Stream 2. Distractions favor Putin.

The West would be wise to observe Russia’s behavior during the Tokyo Olympics. A new Russian offensive would put the West on high alert, and Western officials must be ready for this potential scenario. Otherwise, this incursion could be catastrophic for Europe and deadly for Ukraine.

Mark Temnycky is an accredited freelance journalist covering Eastern Europe.

Is Putin’s next big chance to take Ukraine now? - Atlantic Council

 

[Plain Jane]

Berlin protesters decry coronavirus measures; 600 detained

Thousands have turned out in Berlin to protest the German government’s anti-coronavirus measures despite a ban on the gatherings, leading to clashes with police and the detention of some 600 protesters.

apnews.com

Berlin protesters decry coronavirus measures; 600 detained
By EMILY SCHULTHEISyesterday



1 of 5
Police arrest a demonstrator at an unannounced demonstration at the Victory Column, in Berlin, Sunday Aug. 1, 2021, during a protest against coronavirus restrictions. Hundreds have turned out in Berlin to protest the German government’s anti-coronavirus measures despite a ban on the gatherings, leading to arrests and clashes with police. (Fabian Sommer/dpa via AP)

BERLIN (AP) — Thousands turned out in Berlin on Sunday to protest the German government’s anti-coronavirus measures despite a ban on the gatherings, leading to clashes with police and the detention of some 600 protesters.
Local authorities had banned several different protests this weekend, including one from the Stuttgart-based Querdenker movement, but protesters in Berlin defied the ban.

Berlin’s police department deployed more than 2,000 officers to try and disperse the protests, but it said officers who sought to redirect protesters or disband larger groups were “harassed and attacked.”

“They tried to break through the police cordon and pull out our colleagues,” Berlin police said, adding that officers had to use irritants and batons.

As the crowds made their way from Berlin’s Charlottenburg neighborhood through Tiergarten park toward the Brandenburg Gate, police warned via loudspeaker that they would use water cannons if protesters did not disperse. By Sunday evening, police had detained about 600 people, according to German media, and protesters were still marching through the city.

Germany eased many of its coronavirus restrictions in May, including reopening restaurants and bars. Still, many activities, such as dining indoors at restaurants or staying in a hotel, require proof that an individual is either fully vaccinated, has recovered from the virus or can show proof of a recent negative coronavirus test.

Although the number of new coronavirus cases in Germany remains low compared with neighboring countries, the delta variant has sparked an increase in new infections in the last few weeks. On Sunday, Germany reported 2,097 new cases, an increase of more than 500 over the previous Sunday.
The Querdenker movement, the most visible anti-lockdown movement in Germany, has drawn thousands to its demonstrations in Berlin, uniting a disparate mix on both the right and the left, including those opposing vaccinations, coronavirus deniers, conspiracy theorists and right-wing extremists.

Earlier this year, Germany’s domestic intelligence service warned the movement was becoming increasingly radical and put some of its adherents under surveillance.

Wolfgang Schäuble, president of Germany’s parliament, sharply criticized the Querdenker movement Sunday, encouraging people not to be fooled by “cheap slogans.”
“If practically all experts worldwide say the coronavirus is dangerous and vaccination helps, then who actually has the right to say, ‘Actually, I’m smarter than that?’” he told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung. “To me, that is an almost unbearable level of arrogance.”

The protests follow other demonstrations against coronavirus measures around Europe.

More than 200,000 people turned out Saturday in France to protest vaccination requirements for the third straight weekend, at times clashing with police. Some 80,000 others protested in cities across Italy last weekend.
___

 

[jward]

Thinkin' Good Thoughts <3

 

[Plain Jane]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

UN Special Rapporteur On Torture Requests Info On German Police Brutalizing Anti-Lockdown Protesters

BY TYLER DURDEN
TUESDAY, AUG 03, 2021 - 02:00 AM
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
The UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer has requested more information on an incident in which a female anti-lockdown protester in Berlin was grabbed by the throat and brutally thrown to the ground by riot police.


As we highlighted earlier, the demonstrations ended up with a whopping 600 people being arrested amidst innumerable brazen examples of police brutality, including against children, that were caught on camera.

Germans were protesting against plans to ban unvaccinated people from a plethora of different venues, including restaurants, cinemas and stadiums.

One video clip shows an elderly protester merely attempting to walk past a police officer dressed in riot gear before he grabs her neck with both hands and throws her to the floor.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1421905660686573577

View: https://twitter.com/StanM3/status/1421905660686573577?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1421905660686573577%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fun-special-rapporteur-torture-requests-info-german-police-brutalizing-anti-lockdown


Cops were obviously given orders to enforce a draconian crackdown on the protesters given their behavior throughout the day, which looked like something out of the 1930’s.

The clip caught the attention of Nils Melzer, a professor of international law, whose official title is United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

“This has just been brought to my attention,” tweeted Melzer.
“Can anyone provide my office with the specifics / witness statements of this incident and whether an official investigation has been launched?” he asked.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1421935666963914754

View: https://twitter.com/NilsMelzer/status/1421935666963914754?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1421935666963914754%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fun-special-rapporteur-torture-requests-info-german-police-brutalizing-anti-lockdown


It’s highly unlikely that any investigation will take place given that riot police were clearly ordered to conduct themselves with wanton disregard for basic dignity and human rights.

Another video clip showed a police officer reacting to a young boy’s concern over the treatment of his mother by forcefully pushing him to the floor by his head.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1421878398503247876

View: https://twitter.com/Willow__Bella/status/1421878398503247876?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1421878398503247876%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fun-special-rapporteur-torture-requests-info-german-police-brutalizing-anti-lockdown


Another clip shows two old women also being pushed to the floor by police.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1421885043706793986

View: https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1421885043706793986?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1421885043706793986%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fun-special-rapporteur-torture-requests-info-german-police-brutalizing-anti-lockdown


Another protester also collapsed and died while being harassed by police to show his ID.

Anti-lockdown protesters have been vilified and dehumanized by the media and by vaccine cultists who lobby for them to be treated like lepers.

That’s why such scenes, which would cause outrage if they occurred at a Black Lives Matter or LGBT march, are either totally ignored or callously celebrated.

* * *

 

[Plain Jane]

Belarus Olympic runner who feared going home lands in Poland

Belarusian Olympic sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, who feared for her safety at home after criticizing her coaches on social media, flew into Warsaw on Wednesday night on a humanitarian visa after leaving the Tokyo Olympics.

apnews.com

Belarus runner flies to Europe after feud with team managers
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV7 minutes ago



1 of 11
Belarusian Olympic sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, center, arrives at Narita International Airport in Narita, east of Tokyo Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021. Tsimanouskaya plans to seek refuge in Europe after accusing team officials of trying to force her to leave the Tokyo Games early. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

MOSCOW (AP) — A Belarusian sprinter left Tokyo en route to Europe on Wednesday after resisting an attempt by her Olympic team’s officials to send her home to Belarus, where the athlete said she could be in danger from authorities who have relentlessly cracked down on dissent.

Krystsina Tsimanouskaya boarded a plane at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport that left the gate for Vienna, but she was expected to travel on to Poland. Before leaving Japan, Tsimanouskaya said she hoped she could continue her career but that safety was her immediate priority.

Several countries offered to help after the 24-year-old runner sought refuge in the European Union, and Poland has granted her a humanitarian visa.

Vadim Krivosheyev, an activist with the Belarusian Sport Solidarity Foundation, said Tsimanouskaya took the flight to Austria on the advice of Polish authorities.

“The decision to change the route and fly to Vienna was made by the Polish side for security reasons,” Krivosheyev told The Associated Press.

After landing in Vienna, Tsimanouskaya was expected to head to to Warsaw later Wednesday, according to Krivosheyev.

Tsimanouskaya’s experience at the Tokyo Games became an international issue after she accused Belarusian team officials of hustling her to the airport several days ago and trying to put her on a plane to Belarus because she had criticized the team’s management on social media. The team officials made it clear she would face reprisals back home, she said.

The officials “made it clear that, upon return home, I would definitely face some form of punishment,” Tsimanouskaya told The Associated Press in a videocall interview from Tokyo on Tuesday. “There were also thinly disguised hints that more would await me.”

She added that she believed she would be kicked off Belarus’ national team.
https://apnews.com/article/2020-tok...nals-preview-9951f8db306cb698600e0c751d6e7338

“I would very much like to continue my sporting career because I’m just 24, and I had plans for two more Olympics at least,” Tsimanouskaya said. But “for now, the only thing that concerns me is my safety.”

Reached by phone Tuesday, Dzmitry Dauhalionak, the head of Belarus’ delegation at the Summer Olympics, declined comment, saying that he has “no words.”

Tsimanouskaya’s criticism of how officials were managing her team set off a massive backlash in state-run media in Belarus. The runner said on Instagram that she was put in the 4x400 relay even though she has never raced in the event. She was then barred from competing in the 200 meters.

The sprinter called on international sports authorities Tuesday “to investigate the situation, who gave the order, who actually took the decision that I can’t compete anymore.” She suggested possible sanctions against the head coach.

In the AP interview, Tsimanouskaya also expressed worry for her parents, who remain in Belarus. Her husband, Arseni Zdanevich, told the AP that he decided to leave the country when Tsimanouskaya told him she wasn’t coming back.

Belarus was rocked by months of protests after President Alexander Lukashenko won a sixth term in an August 2020 election that the opposition and the West saw as rigged. Authorities responded to demonstrations with a sweeping crackdown that saw over 35,000 people arrested and thousands beaten by police.

In a show of determination to stifle dissent at any cost, they diverted a passenger plane that was flying from Greece to Lithuania in May and ordered it to land in the Belarusian capital where they arrested an opposition journalist who was on board.

The authoritarian Belarusian president, who led the Belarus National Olympic Committee for almost a quarter-century before handing over the job to his older son in February, has shown a keen interest in sports, seeing it as a key element of national prestige.

Both Lukashenko and his son were banned from the Tokyo Games by the International Olympic Committee, which investigated complaints from athletes that they faced intimidation during the crackdown on anti-government protests over the last year.

Western leaders have condemned Tsimanouskaya’s treatment by Belarusian authorities.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken denounced Belarusian officials’ attempt to force Tsimanouskaya to return to Belarus for exercising free speech as “another act of transnational repression.”

“Such actions violate the Olympic spirit, are an affront to basic rights, and cannot be tolerated,” Blinken said on Twitter.

___ Associated Press writer Yuras Karmanau in Kyiv, Ukraine contributed to this report.

 

[Plain Jane]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Southeastern Europe Devastated By Wildfires

BY TYLER DURDEN
WEDNESDAY, AUG 04, 2021 - 07:27 AM
A dangerous heat wave is ravaging parts of southeastern Europe resulting in wildfires across Turkey, Greece, and Italy, according to VOA News.

Firefighters across the European Union arrived in Turkey on Monday. The wildfires have burned for at least one week as political opposition mounts against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for his sluggish fire response.

Turkey doesn't have firefighting planes and has had to rely on other countries, including several EU members, for aerial fire support.

Erdogan tweeted a statement regarding the fires: "We will continue to take all necessary steps to heal our nation's wounds, compensate for its losses, and improve its opportunities even better than before."

Nex store in Greece, thousands of residents were evacuated in Athens as wildfires tore through the northern district of the metro area. Homes were burnt, and power grids were severed.

"It is a large fire and it will take a lot of work to get this under control," greater Athens regional governor George Patoulis told state-run ERT television. "The foliage is very dense in these areas and it is very dried out due to the heatwave, so the conditions are difficult."

On Tuesday, high temperatures were a blistering 115F as the country faces the worst heat wave in three decades.

"The fire is still raging, its perimeter is very wide and the heat load is very strong," a fire official said Wednesday, according to Reuters.

On Wednesday, Greek emergency services warned residents and tourists of "extreme fire danger" in Rhodes and Crete.

In Italy, firefighters used helicopters with water buckets to battle the country's wildfires along the Adriatic coast and Sicily region. Italy's National Fire Corps said air tankers from Canada supported efforts to reduce the spread of fires where at least 715 flare-ups have been observed in the past 24 hours.

The heat wave is expected to abate in southeastern Europe after this weekend.

 

[Plain Jane]

Red Cross questions Lithuania on trying to block migrants

The Red Cross is warning that Lithuania's decision to turn away immigrants attempting to cross in from neighboring Belarus does not comply with international law.

apnews.com

Red Cross questions Lithuania on trying to block migrants
By LIUDAS DAPKUSyesterday



1 of 15
Migrants stand behind a fence inside the newly built refugee camp in the Rudninkai military training ground, some 38km (23,6 miles) south from Vilnius, Lithuania, Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021. The Red Cross warned Wednesday that Lithuania's decision to turn away immigrants attempting to cross in from neighboring Belarus does not comply with international law. Lithuania, a member of the European Union, has faced a surge of mostly Iraqi migrants in the past few months. Some 4,090 migrants, most of them from Iraq, have crossed this year from Belarus into Lithuania. (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis)

VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — The Red Cross warned Wednesday that Lithuania’s decision to turn away immigrants attempting to cross in from neighboring Belarus does not comply with international law.

Lithuania, a member of the European Union, has faced a surge of mostly Iraqi migrants in the past few months. It says that’s due to retaliation by Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko after the EU put sanctions on his country over an air piracy incident.

The Lithuanian Interior Ministry this week distributed a video shot from a helicopter showing large groups of immigrants being escorted to Lithuania’s border by Belarusian border guard vehicles.

On Tuesday, Lithuania said it reserved the right to use force to stop such illegal immigration and turned away 180 people attempting to enter the country. But rights groups noted that all nations have an obligation to protect vulnerable people.

“Pushbacks of people seeking asylum are not compatible with the Geneva Convention on Refugee Status, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and other human rights instruments” Egle Samuchovaite, program director for Lithuania’s Red Cross, told The Associated Press.
Samuchovaite also pointed out that rejecting the admission of vulnerable people into the country would put them into an unsafe environment, trapped between two countries.

“In the absence of a physical border barrier with Belarus, the question arises as to how to ensure that there is no disproportionate use of force against asylum seekers, which by any means could not be justified,” she said, adding that the Red Cross understands the state’s challenges in protecting its border.

Lithuania, a nation of less than 3 million people, has no physical barriers for its 679-kilometer (420-mile) long border with Belarus. Some 4,090 migrants, most of them from Iraq, have crossed this year from Belarus into Lithuania.

Another 35 people crossed into Lithuania illegally on Wednesday, according to the State Border Guard Service, but this was significantly lower than the triple-digit numbers of previous days.

Belarus claimed Wednesday that a “non-Slavic” person died from injuries at a border town but Lithuania dismissed the report as propaganda from a hostile regime.

“This is nonsense, a Brothers Grimm fairy tale,” Lithuania Interior Minister Agne Bilotaite told reporters.

Defense Minister Arvydas Anusauskas called the report “an obvious provocation. Lithuania is under hybrid attack and spreading such information is a classic example of this process.”

Later Wednesday, the Belarusian State Border Committee claimed that five Iraqi migrants who were forcibly expelled to Belarus from Lithuania had injuries, including dog bites, and had been hospitalized.
___
Follow all AP stories on developments in Belarus at https;//apnews.com/hub/Belarus.
___
Follow all AP stories on global migration at Migration.

 

[Plain Jane]

French will need health pass by Monday after court approval

A French constitutional court has validated most aspects of a new law that, starting next week, requires that people carry a special COVID-19 health pass to access cafes, restaurants, long-distance travel and, in some cases, hospitals.

apnews.com

French will need health pass by Monday after court approval
By ELAINE GANLEY and CONSTANTIN GOUVYyesterday



1 of 8
An anti heath pass demonstrator holds a French flag as he faces police officers outside the Constitutional Council in Paris, Thursday, Aug. 5,2021. France's Constitutional Council is deciding on Thursday whether the health pass that is to open the doors and terraces to cafes, restaurants, trains and hospitals starting next week is in line with the nation's most cherished principles. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

PARIS (AP) — A French constitutional court on Thursday validated most aspects of a new law that, starting next week, requires people to carry a special COVID-19 health pass to access cafes, restaurants, long-distance travel and, in some cases, hospitals. But it struck down several measures for not meeting constitutional muster.

The Constitutional Council ruled that the automatic 10-day isolation of people infected with the virus, allowed to go outside for only two hours per day, goes against French freedoms. Such deprivation of liberty is not “necessary, adapted or proportional,” the ruling said. The current, less strict 10-day self-isolation for people infected with the virus will apparently remain in effect.

The court also struck down suspension of short-term contracts for those without a health pass — while accepting a suspension without remuneration of salaried employees with long-term contracts.

The legislation was sped urgently through parliament last week as virus infections soared, due to the highly contagious delta variant which now accounts for most cases in France.

Polls show that most French support the health pass. But the measure has ardent opponents, with many claiming their freedoms will be compromised. It is issued to people either vaccinated against COVID-19, or who have proof of recent recovery from the infection, or a recent negative test.

Starting Monday, it will be required for long-distance travel by train, plane or bus, entering restaurants, cafes and their terraces and rest homes — among a long list laid out in the law and approved in the ruling. The special court appeared to wince at the regulations but decided that overall a balance was struck between freedom and “the constitutional value of health protection.”

The Council also approved obliging health care workers to be vaccinated against the virus by Sept. 15. And it ruled that requiring the health pass for hospital visitors and others is justified — if it “doesn’t create an obstacle to accessing health care.”

Several hundred noisy protesters in front of the Constitutional Council in Paris denounced the ruling, under the eye of nearly as many heavily armed police.

Julien Bailly, 37, who makes harpsichords, wore a “Health dictatorship: Stop” sticker on his shirt.

He said he was fully vaccinated, but “everyone should be able to make that choice freely, not because oppressive laws force them to. Soon we’ll need QR codes for everything in life,” he added. “This is a slippery slope and an unprecedented attack on our freedoms.”

Critics complain that it limits their movements outside home — and implicitly renders vaccinations obligatory. Opponents have demonstrated around the country by the tens of thousands for the past three Saturdays, with more protests expected this weekend.

A 26-year-old protester who identified herself only as Charlotte said she distrusts the COVID-19 vaccine and resents it being forced on her. “The health pass won’t change my decision, I’ll never get the vaccine,” she said.

The Constitutional Council which examined the law is a special court which, among other things, reviews the constitutionality of legislation.

The health pass has been in effect since July 21 for cultural and recreational venues, including cinemas, concert halls and theme parks with capacity for more than 50 people. But the new law vastly extends its application.

Many restaurant owners say it is not their job to enforce the law, checking each client for a pass. Some health professionals have voiced fears that patients in need of non-urgent treatment could suffer.

“Quite a few people have told us they wouldn’t be coming back once the health pass is implemented,” said Vanessa Shi, co-owner of a noodle restaurant near the Champs-Elysees Avenue.
“We’ve been insulted on several occasions, with people calling us sell-outs and worse for saying we would implement the measure,” she said. “But with the bills we’ve racked up during the pandemic ... it’s a matter of survival for us.”

Prime Minister Jean Castex said the ruling allows for “full deployment of the strategy against COVID-19.” Disappointed that the article on strict isolation of those infected was struck down, he asked that recommended isolation be “scrupulously” respected.

More than 28,700 new infections were reported as of Wednesday evening, a steep climb from one month ago. The pandemic has claimed more than 112,000 lives in France.
___
Follow all of AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and Understanding the Outbreak

 

[northern watch]

Pentagon to hold on to several bases in Europe over rising tensions

By Mike Glenn - The Washington Times - Friday, August 6, 2021

Rising tensions sparked by the rise of Russian military activity is apparently prompting the U.S. military to keep control of six bases in Germany and Belgium that were to have been turned over to the host nations.

The closure of the bases was part of the general winding down of U.S. military operations in Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union. According to the U.S. Army command that oversees operations in Europe and Africa, the bases will instead be retained “due to growing requirements in the European theater.”

One of the bases, Coleman Barracks in Mannheim, Germany, was to have been closed in 2010 and turned over to Germany. Other sites in locations throughout Germany targeted for transfer had been announced in 2015 during the Department of Defense’s European Consolidation.

In 2018, growing tensions in Europe caused the Pentagon to initiate a reassessment of the remaining sites in the region, even as President Trump was pushing for a reduction of the American military footprint on the continent.

“Through this assessment, it was found the sites should be retained as the requirements in growth are outpacing facility construction and renovation,” the Army command said in a statement.

Coleman Barracks is part of the Army’s pre-positioned stock and is responsible for the storage and maintenance of more than 800 armored vehicles that would be used by troops arriving from the United States in the event of hostilities.

“The retention of Coleman Barracks will provide easier access for [regionally deployed forces] due to its close proximity to the Autobahn, as well as rail and barge loading facilities,” Army officials said.

One of the bases, Daumerie Caserne, provides services for U.S. military troops supporting NATO headquarters in Belgium. Under the new plan, it will be used to support an intermediate staging base and aid in operations for personnel arriving into Europe.



Pentagon to hold on to several bases in Europe over rising tensions - Washington Times

 

[Plain Jane]

Belarus moves to stop Lithuania from sending back migrants

Belarus’ border protection agency says it has tightened control along the border with Lithuania to prevent Lithuanian authorities from sending migrants back to Belarus.

apnews.com

Belarus moves to stop Lithuania from sending back migrants
By YURAS KARMANAUyesterday



1 of 8
In this grab taken from video released by Belarusian State Border Committee on Friday, Aug. 6, 2021, migrants gather between Lithuanian-Belarusian border on their way to Belarus. Belarus’ border protection agency says it has tightened control along the border with Lithuania to prevent Lithuanian authorities from sending migrants back to Belarus. Lithuania, a member of the European Union, has faced an influx of mostly Iraqi migrants in the past few months. (Belarusian State Border Committee via AP)

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Belarus’ border protection agency said Friday that it tightened control along its border with Lithuania to prevent Lithuanian authorities from sending migrants back to Belarus.

Lithuania, a member of the European Union, has faced an influx of mostly Iraqi migrants in the past few months. It accused the government of Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko of encouraging the migrant flow in retaliation for the EU sanctions against his country following the diversion of a passenger plane to arrest a dissident journalist aboard.

Meanwhile, another EU member, Poland, also said it was seeing a rising number of Iraqi and Afghan migrants trying to enter from Belarus, in what a government official calls an element in a “hybrid war.”

In an emotional Facebook post, Lithuanian parliament’s human rights ombudsman Vytautas Valentinavicius described Lithuanian border police blocking dozens of migrants from crossing into the country and urging them to get back to Belarus early Friday while the Belarusian border guards fired warning shots into the air to deter them in a tense standoff.

As the situation escalates, Lukashenko ordered defense and security agencies on Thursday to “close every meter of the border” to keep out immigrants Lithuania sends back into Belarus.
Belarus state TV posted an image of Belarusian border guards standing in a line to close the border while a migrant with a child sits at their feet.

“The border guards used all necessary means to prevent the unlawful crossing of the border in view of the current situation under which the Lithuanian side is taking foreign citizens seeking refuge in the EU to the border,” the Belarus State Border Committee said in Friday’s statement.

It said it created mobile tactical groups to patrol the entire length of the border to prevent Lithuania from sending migrants back into Belarus.

Authorities in Belarus this week alleged that Iraqi immigrants forcibly expelled from Lithuania and sent back to Belarus had injuries, including dog bites, and had to be hospitalized. Belarus also claimed Wednesday that a “non-Slavic” person died from injuries at a border town but Lithuania dismissed the report as propaganda from a hostile regime.

Lithuania, a nation of less than 3 million people, has no physical barriers on its 679-kilometer (420-mile) long border with Belarus. More than 4,100 migrants, most of them from Iraq, have crossed this year from Belarus into Lithuania.

The prime ministers of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania issued a joint statement Friday, expressing their grave concern about the “ongoing hybrid attack” by Lukashenko’s government.

They said the three Baltic nations stand together to “effectively protect the EU external border” and prevent migrants from heading to other EU members.

Maciej Wasik, a deputy interior minister in Poland, echoed that language, accusing Belarus of using migrants as a “living weapon” in a “hybrid war.”

Wasik said Polish authorities see the move as retribution for helping Belarusian Olympic sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya come to Poland earlier this week to avoid possible reprisals in her homeland after a feud with her coaches at the Tokyo Games.

He said Poland has seen fewer migrants than Lithuania because its border is better guarded but that “in the last days we can see an increase.”

 

[Plain Jane]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

"No Vaccine Passports" - Thousands Protest Across France Over New COVID Rules

BY TYLER DURDEN
SATURDAY, AUG 07, 2021 - 01:30 PM
Protests are still going strong in French cities after weeks of demonstrations following mandatory COVID health passes. France is in a dangerous state where social turmoil could worsen into late summer.
On Saturday, tens of thousands of people took to the street in several French cities for the fourth weekend in a row (for prior protests, read: here & here) against a coronavirus passport and other virus restrictions that continue to whittle down freedoms.




The new health passes, championed by President Emmanuel Macron, are mandatory for entry into restaurants, bars, and other public spaces. This comes as the new delta variant is spreading throughout Europe.
According to AFP News, protests are expected in 150 cities today, with some 200,000 in attendance.
The scenes in downtown Paris show thousands marching against the loss of liberties due to health passports.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1424007012006907909

View: https://twitter.com/f_philippot/status/1424007012006907909?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1424007012006907909%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fmarkets%2Fparis-protest


Demonstrations became violent in Toulouse, a city in France's southern Occitanie region that sits near the Spanish border.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1424017600175083522

View: https://twitter.com/Demo2020cracy/status/1424017600175083522?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1424017600175083522%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fmarkets%2Fparis-protest

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1424041401403256832

View: https://twitter.com/LandoFree/status/1424041401403256832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1424041401403256832%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fmarkets%2Fparis-protest

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1424031390958501896

View: https://twitter.com/FranckAlbi/status/1424031390958501896?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1424031390958501896%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fmarkets%2Fparis-protest


Thousands marched in Nice, a city located on the French Riviera.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1424020774537547782

View: https://twitter.com/AnonymeCitoyen/status/1424020774537547782?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1424020774537547782%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fmarkets%2Fparis-protest



Another protest was held in the northern French city of Lille.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1423984384126902276

View: https://twitter.com/linval59/status/1423984384126902276?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1423984384126902276%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fmarkets%2Fparis-protest


The latest round of demonstrations comes after France's top court deemed new virus restrictions and health passes constitutional. The European country is on the brink of more intense rallies if government officials don't figure out how to suppress the anger.

 

[Plain Jane]

Europe is burning: Four explanations – DW – 08/06/2021

Barely halfway through summer, the area burned by wildfires raging through the Balkans, Italy and the southeastern Mediterranean has already eclipsed yearly averages.

www.dw.com

Europe is burning: Four explanations
Barely halfway through summer, the area burned by wildfires raging through the Balkans, Italy and the southeastern Mediterranean has already eclipsed yearly averages.




Sheep are shepherded away from an advancing fire in Marmaris in western Turkey, a region struggling against its deadliest wildfires in decades

Wildfires burning across southern Europe in the last month — whether sparked naturally by lightning, or by arsonists — have been flamed by drought and extreme heat.

Scientists have no doubt that climate change is the key driver of yet another extreme fire season. They also understand that climate adaptation in fire-prone countries is inadequate to deal with wildfires that are set to worsen.

We look at why Mediterranean and Balkan countries are so prone to wildfires and explore the consequences of a warming world.

1. Why is the Mediterranean region burning now?
Summer wildfires are a natural and often necessary part of the life of Mediterranean forests. In the decade before 2016, around 48,000 forest fires burned 457,000 hectares annually across the five southern European nations where wildfires are most prevalent: Spain, France, Portugal, Italy and Greece. According to the scientists, fire can also breed renewal and foster biodiversity in these regions.

Indeed, communities have learned to cope better with the average annual fires in hot and arid regions across southern Europe, with more sophisticated fire prevention strategies leading to an overall decline in the number and size of fires since 1980.

But too often in recent years, fire events have escalated way beyond their normal size and intensity.

Devastating 2017 and 2018 wildfires claimed hundreds of lives across an area stretching from Turkey to Spain, while countries in central and northern Europe, including Sweden, were also scorched.

Such unprecedented fire events are inevitably linked to extreme droughts and heat waves.

2. What is starting the fires?
The month of July was the second-hottest ever recorded in Europe (and the third hottest globally). The south of the continent has been the focus of this extreme heat, with temperatures in Greece this week expected to peak at 47 degrees Celsius (117 degrees Fahrenheit).

Greece and neighboring Turkey are in the midst of a heat wave that could be the worst in 30 years — invoking memories of the nightmarish 1987 fire season that claimed more than 1,500 victims in Greece alone.

In Turkey, almost 200 separate wildfires have raged through the country in just over a week, forcing some coastal residents and tourists to flee into the Aegean for safety.

So while arson and natural causes such as lightning are equally to blame for starting the fires, extreme heat has increased their intensity and is the real culprit for the destruction wreaked across fire-hit regions. This is why at least 55% more area has burned across Europe by August 5 than the average over the previous 12 years.

This fact is compounded by outdated forest management, and sometimes even the over-protection of natural forests.

A fire on August 1 blazed through the Pineta Dannunziana, an urban pine forest in the Italian city of Pescara, forcing 800 people to evacuate. But because the area is a protected nature reserve, it is not subject to forest management such as regular clearing of undergrowth or being subjected to controlled burns. "The undergrowth burned very quickly," said Carlo Masci, mayor of Pescara.

Meanwhile, existing fire suppression policies do not account for the impact of global heating on the flammability of areas where wildlands (sometimes grown up on abandoned agricultural land) and expanding urban centers more commonly interface. This was evidenced by the flaming outer suburbs of Athens this week.

"In most Mediterranean regions, the current wildfire management policies are generally too focused on suppression and are no longer adapted to the ongoing global change," wrote the authors of a 2021 study on "Understanding Changes to Fires in Southern Europe."

3. So what has climate got to do with it?
While the burned area of the Mediterranean region has decreased slightly over the last 40 years, this is mainly due to more effective fire control efforts, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA).

Global heating increases the frequency and severity of fire weather conditions globally — as witnessed during the unprecedented wildfires across Australia and California in recent years. And inevitably, climate change has increased forest fire risk across the whole of Europe, including central and northern regions that are not typically fire-prone.

The current record droughts and heat waves across the Mediterranean region echo the events of 2018 when "more countries suffered large fires than ever before," according to the EEA.
In Greece, more than 100 people died in the so-called Attica fires of 2018 — the second-deadliest fire event this century after the 2009 "Black Saturday" fires in Australia.

"An expansion of fire-prone areas and longer fire seasons are projected in most European regions," stated the EEA.

Carbon emissions are not decreasing fast enough to limit this heating, despite climate agreements such as the European Green Deal and Paris Climate Accord.

"They put out plans, they define goals, but they don't really act," said Mojib Latif, a climate scientist at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research. "Since 1990, global carbon emissions increased 60%," he told DW, adding that emissions will rise again in 2021 following the pandemic-related slowdown the previous year.

4. What are the global climate change repercussions?
Globally, wildfires are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions, and for 5% to 8% of the 3.3 million annual premature deaths from poor air quality, according to climate group Carbon Brief.

But carbon emissions from wildfires have been on the decline in recent decades. This again is due to improved fire prevention.

The problem remaining is fire severity or intensity, which has a more far-reaching effect on carbon sequestration since forests burn so badly that they do not regrow.
In 2017, CO2 emissions from extreme wildfires across southwestern Europe (namely the Iberian Peninsula, southern France and Italy) were the highest since at least 2003, reaching approximately 37 teragrams of CO2.
To put this in context, the exceptionally wide-ranging wildfires over the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean coast in 2003 accounted for the same level of anthropogenic emissions as all of western Europe for that year.
And if the wildfire intensity kills off significant forest cover in 2021, the resulting loss of carbon sinks could be even more devastating for the climate.


Watch video01:37
Heat wave fuels wildfires in Turkey, Italy and Greece

See this thread also:

DISASTER - Greece fires spread uncontrolled, killing a fireman

Greece fires spread uncontrolled, killing a fireman Published 41 minutes ago Related Topics Climate change image sourceAFP image captionOne of the worst blazes has struck the island of Evia, close to Athens Two people have been killed, including a firefighter, as uncontrolled wildfires...

www.timebomb2000.com

 

[northern watch]

 

[northern watch]

 

[Plain Jane]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Turkey & The West: Drifting Further Apart

BY TYLER DURDEN
MONDAY, AUG 09, 2021 - 03:30 AM
Authored by Burak Bekdil via The Gatestone Institute,
In theory, Turkey is a NATO ally. In theory, also, Turkey is in negotiations with the European Union for full membership. In reality, both are illusions.


In September 2010, Turkish and Chinese aircraft conducted joint exercises in Turkish airspace. In 2011, the Turkish government announced plans to build a ballistic missile with a range of 2,500 kilometers. In 2012, Turkey joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) as a dialogue partner. (Other dialogue partners were Belarus and Sri Lanka; observers were Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Mongolia.) Since then, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said numerous times that Ankara will abandon its quest to join the EU if it is offered full membership in the SCO.
In September 2013, Turkey announced that it had selected a Chinese company for the construction of its first long-range air and anti-missile defense system. After Ankara scrapped that contract, it went on to acquire the Russian-made S-400 system, which resulted in Turkey's suspension from the U.S.-led multinational consortium that builds the F-35 fifth-generation fighter jet. The S-400 controversy also triggered U.S. CAATSA sanctions against Turkey.
Turkey's sociopolitical distance from the West has been growing steadily. New research, by the Turkish pollsters Areda Survey, has shown that:

• 54.6% of Turks view the U.S. as the biggest security threat to their country while 51% think the biggest threat is Israel; 31.1% think it is the United Arab Emirates; and 30.7% think it is Saudi Arabia.
• 35.5% of Turks consider the U.S. unreliable; 32.8% think it is a colonialist state.
• 72.2% object to any kind of cooperation with the U.S.
• When asked with which one of the two countries Turkey should develop its relations, 78.9% said Russia against 21.1% who defended cooperation with the U.S.
• 58.2% of Turks think that Russia is their strategic ally.
• 69.3% think that the acquisition of the Russian S-400 system was the right decision.

Turkey's self-alienation from the West and Western institutions is not unrequited. New research in Europe shows how Europeans, once enthusiastic about Turkish membership in the EU, now feel Turkey does not belong with their political culture.

In April, the European Council on Foreign Relations surveyed more than 17,000 people in 12 European countries. The survey found that:

"Turkey is the only country that more Europeans see as an adversary than a necessary partner. Given that Turkey is a NATO member – unlike China, Russia, India, and Japan, all of which Europeans consider less threatening – this finding is quite worrying. Only 25% of Europeans see Turkey as a necessary partner, and only 4% see it as an ally with shared values and interests. In Germany, 41% of respondents consider Turkey an adversary.
"Our survey shows that Europeans generally want a cooperative rather than a confrontational foreign policy. The idea of 'strategic partnerships' is deeply embedded in the DNA of Europeans. At the same time, Europeans understand there are aspects of their relations with Russia, China, and Turkey that make these countries rivals or even adversaries."

Turkey is not better perceived across the Atlantic. President Joe Biden's use of the word "genocide" on April 24 perhaps was not a game-changer in deeply problematic U.S.-Turkish relations, but it enhances Turkey's political isolation, weakens its arguments on whether a genocide did or did not occur from 1915-24, and further destabilizes whatever is left of Ankara's soft power. "The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today," President Biden said on Armenian Remembrance Day. With that statement, Biden became the first U.S. president to recognize the Armenian genocide.

More recently, Ambassador John Bolton, the former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, said he has joined the advisory council of the Turkish Democracy Project, a newly launched institution, "to shine a light on the darkening situation" in Turkey.

The Turkish Democracy Project is "a nonprofit, non-partisan, international policy organization formed in response to Turkey's recent turn away from democracy and toward authoritarianism," its website says.

"It's time to sound the alarm on Turkey," Bolton wrote in his Twitter announcement. He went on to describe Ankara as a one-time reliable NATO ally that has grown uncomfortably close to Russia.

On July 1, the U.S. added Turkey to a list of countries that are implicated in the use of child soldiers over the past year, thereby for the first time placing a NATO ally on such a list. It is a move that is likely further to complicate the already fraught ties between Ankara and Washington. The U.S. State Department determined in its 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report that Turkey was providing "tangible support" to the Sultan Murad division in Syria, a faction of Syrian opposition that Ankara has long supported and a group that Washington has said recruited and used child soldiers.

The feeling of drifting apart between the Turks and Westerners is mutual and growing. It is an inevitable result of Turkey's top-to-bottom Islamization over the past two decades. The West now has a small Russia to deal with.

 

[Plain Jane]

Epstein accuser sues Prince Andrew over alleged sexual abuse when she was a teen

One of Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime accusers sued Prince Andrew on Monday, saying he sexually assaulted her when she was 17.

www.france24.com

Epstein accuser sues Prince Andrew over alleged sexual abuse when she was a teen
Issued on: 10/08/2021 - 02:46

Giuffre first made the allegations against Prince Andrew in 2019. He “categorically” denies them. © Lindsey Parnaby, AFP/File
Text by:NEWS WIRES
5 min
One of Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime accusers sued Prince Andrew on Monday, saying he sexually assaulted her when she was 17.

Lawyers for Virginia Giuffre filed the lawsuit in Manhattan federal court.
In a statement, Giuffre said the lawsuit was brought under the Child Victims Act to allege she was trafficked to him and sexually abused by him.

“I am holding Prince Andrew accountable for what he did to me,” she said. “The powerful and rich are not exempt from being held responsible for their actions. I hope that other victims will see that it is possible not to live in silence and fear, but to reclaim one’s life by speaking out and demanding justice.


“I did not come to this decision lightly,” she added. “As a mother and a wife, my family comes first — and I know that this action will subject me to further attacks by Prince Andrew and his surrogates — but I knew if I did not pursue this action, I would be letting them and victims everywhere down.”

In late 2019, Prince Andrew told BBC Newsnight that he never had sex with Giuffre, saying, “It didn’t happen.”

He said he has “no recollection” of ever meeting her and told an interviewer there are “a number of things that are wrong” about Giuffre’s account, which alleges the encounter occurred in 2001.

“I can absolutely categorically tell you it never happened,” Andrew said.

From 2019: Woman at centre of Prince Andrew sex abuse scandal appeals to Britons to take her side

01:38
According to the lawsuit, which sought unspecified compensatory and punitive damages, the prince abused Giuffre on multiple occasions when she was under the age of 18.

It said that on one occasion, the prince sexually abused her in London at the home of Ghislaine Maxwell when Epstein, Maxwell and Prince Andrew forced her to have sexual intercourse with the prince against her will.

On another occasion, Prince Andrew sexually abused Plaintiff in Epstein’s New York mansion when Maxwell forced Giuffre and another victim to sit on Andrew’s lap as he touched her, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit also alleged that Andrew sexually abused Giuffre on Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

During each of the alleged acts, Giuffre was given “express or implied threats” by Epstein, Maxwell, and/or Andrew to engage in sexual acts with the prince, the lawsuit said.

It said that she “feared death or physical injury to herself or another and other repercussions for disobeying” the trio because of their “powerful connections, wealth, and authority,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit added that Andrew knew her age at the time based on communications with Epstein and Maxwell. It said he went ahead anyway “for the purpose of gratifying his sexual desires.”

Maxwell, 59, has pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking charges in Manhattan federal court, where she faces trial in November.

Epstein, 66, took his own life in a federal jail in Manhattan in August 2019, a month after he was arrested on sex trafficking charges.
As part of its continuing probe into Epstein and his encounters with women and teenage girls, Manhattan federal prosecutors formally requested to speak with Andrew.

The request, similar to issuing a subpoena, was made under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, an agreement between the two countries to share evidence and information in criminal cases.
(AP)

 

[Plain Jane]

Italy swelters as Spain, Portugal brace for coming heat wave

Italy is baking in sweltering temperatures that continue to drive deadly wildfires. while Spain and Portugal are bracing for the arrival of a dangerous heat wave that is starting to push west toward the Iberian peninsula

apnews.com

Spain, Portugal brace for wildfire threat as temps soar
By BARRY HATTON44 minutes ago

A woman fans herself in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2021. Temperatures are beginning to rise at the start of an oncoming heatwave in Spain which will last up until the weekend with temperatures expected to reach over 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees fahrenheit) in Madrid and southern Spain. (AP Photo/Paul White)

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — Spain and Portugal are bracing for temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in coming days, as a mass of hot, dry air from Africa pushes north into the Iberian peninsula.

Portugal’s prime minister warned Wednesday that the hot weather increases the threat of wildfires, which in 2017 killed more than 100 people in his country. Spain’s weather service forecast a heat wave through Monday and said temperatures could surpass 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit) in some areas.

A recent heat wave across southern Europe that was fed by hot air from North Africa contributed to massive wildfires breaking out in Turkey, Greece, Algeria and elsewhere in the Mediterranean region.

“The maximum and minimum temperatures will reach levels far above the normal for this time of the year,” Spain’s weather service, AEMET, said in a “special weather warning.”

Such peaks of temperature are not unheard of in Spain and Portugal during the summer months. Even so, climate scientists say there is little doubt climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas is driving extreme events, such as heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods and storms.
Researchers can directly link a single event to climate change only through intensive data analysis, but they say such calamities are expected to happen more frequently on our warming planet.

Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa urged people to take special care amid the scorching weather and wildfire danger, adding that many wildfires start with careless behavior.
Costa said “the terrible images” from Greece and Turkey in recent days brought back Portuguese memories of 2017.

“We don’t want to see that scenario here again,” Costa said in a videotaped message at his official residence.

Portuguese authorities say they can deploy more than 12,000 firefighters, some 2,700 vehicles and 60 aircraft during the summer season.

Portugal has in recent years reduced by more than half the number of wildfires and amount of charred acreage compared with the average of the previous 10 years, according to the Agency for Integrated Wildfire Management, a government body.

Authorities enacted a broad range of measures after 2017. They included better forest management, including woodland clearance projects and technical support for people living in rural areas, opening thousands of kilometers (miles) of firebreaks and reacting more rapidly to outbreaks with special firefighting units.

Nobody has died in forest blazes in Portugal since 2017.
___
Follow all AP stories about climate change issues at Climate.

 

[Plain Jane]

Will Romania step up anti-LGBTQ legislation like Hungary? – DW – 08/11/2021

Inspired by Hungary's increasingly homophobic laws, an unholy alliance of nationalist and far-right politicians is trying to push anti-LGBTQ legislation in Romania too.

www.dw.com

Will Romania step up anti-LGBTQ legislation like Hungary?
Inspired by Hungary's increasingly homophobic laws, an unholy alliance of nationalist and far-right politicians is trying to push anti-LGBTQ legislation in Romania too.




Romania does not recognize same-sex marriage

Many Romanians probably do not know what the letters LGBTQ stand for, and this is hardly surprising given that sexual orientation and gender identity have not played a major role in the country's public debate in recent years. Although a referendum seeking to prevent same-sex marriage from ever being legalized was held in 2018 after being championed by the Romanian Orthodox Church, it failed after only 21% of eligible voters turned up to cast their ballot.

Now, an alliance of conservative, right-wing parties is attempting to put the issue at the top of the agenda, campaigning against what they call 'LGBTQ ideology' and 'gay propaganda'. It has drawn inspiration from anti-LGBTQ legislation that recently came into effect in Viktor Orban's Hungary, which bans 'LGBT content' in schools for instance, and conflates pedophilia, homosexuality and transsexuality.

Romanians in favor of similar legislation say that minors have to be 'protected' from 'LGBTQ propaganda' and plan to put forward a bill in parliament.

Watch video05:14
Landmark ruling for same-sex couples in EU
'The evil is done'
This is a contentious issue in many respects, with ramifications that transcend domestic politics. "The evil is done," wrote Dan Tapalaga of the independent media outlet G4Media.ro. "Subversive anti-EU narrative has arrived in our mainstream too." The lawyer and former presidential adviser on national minorities Peter Eckstein-Kovacs told DW that this was "an attempt to include Romania, which so far has been clearly pro-European, in an anti-European, pro-Kremlin alliance."

The initiative for anti-LGBTQ legislation came from the Hungarian People's Party of Transylvania (PPMT) and the Hungarian Civic Party (MPP), neither of which has any elected members of parliament. However, the PPMT is represented in the Bucharest chamber of deputies by Zoltan Zakarias, who was elected on the list of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR).

The UDMR has not yet positioned itself on the initiative but a spokesperson said that it would do so in autumn if a bill is presented during the new session. However, the alliance has explicitly supported the Hungarian referendum on child protection that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has announced will be held next January.

Thousands marched across Hungary for LGBT rights and against the government in July

The UDMR has called on all Romanians who also hold Hungarian nationality to take part in the referendum. Members of Romania's ethnic Hungarian minority have the right to vote in Hungary.

Watch video02:10
Budapest holds Pride march against Hungary's anti-LGBTQ law
'Orban of Romania'
A few days after the first initiative, the far-right Alliance for the Unification of Romanians (AUR), which holds 10% of the seats in parliament, announced that it too would introduce an anti-LGBTQ law based on the Hungarian legislation.

Paradoxically, the party has campaigned vehemently against the ethnic Hungarian minority in Romania but its co-president George Simion, who recently described himself as the 'Orban of Romania' is a vocal admirer. His party is trying to join a new European alliance of extreme right parties, which Orban is currently setting up with allies in France, Italy, Poland and elsewhere.

Though a draft law has not yet been presented, there is no doubting the explosive nature of the issue, largely because of the stance of the UDMR. Though it is part of the liberal, pro-European three-party coalition that came to power at the end of 2020, in recent years it has almost become a mouthpiece for Orban and his Fidesz party in Romania.

By lending its support to the referendum in Hungary and possibly to anti-LGBT legislation in Romania, it will drag the Romanian government and all the coalition parties into the conflict that Orban has stirred up with the EU. In actual fact, it might well be a deliberate maneuver on its part because of its opposition to certain anti-corruption and judicial reforms.

'It will play into Orban's hands'
The Bucharest-based political scientist Cristian Pirvulescu told DW that the "informal alliance between the UDMR and the AUR" created considerable problems for a liberal government in a liberal-leaning Romania. "This will play into Viktor Orban's hands," he said, adding that what was happening in Transylvania were the first signs of next year's parliamentary election campaign in Hungary. "For Orban, it is very important to have the votes of the Hungarians of Transylvania, who are conservative but not anti-European, and that's why he's trying to mobilize them with themes such as LGBTQ, which divide society and make it easy to obtain votes."

The LGBT community remains stigmatized in Romania

The lawyer Peter Eckstein-Kovacs, who was a member of the UDMR for a long time himself and represented its defunct liberal wing, is very worried about the alliance's policies today, drawing historical parallels. "The Germans of Transylvania had a very strong regional identity," he said. "But in the 1930s the slogan 'Transylvania, sweet homeland' turned into 'Deutschland, Deutschland über alles' (Germany, Germany above all)," he said. "For me, the Transylvanian Hungarians have arrived at this point. The feeling of a Transylvanian homeland is becoming one of common Hungarian blood and homeland. I believe that this is very dangerous."

Cristian Pirvulescu agreed with this analysis, saying that the UDMR used to campaign for the integration of Transylvania's Hungarians into a multicultural and multi-ethnic Transylvania, but now represents the idea of an ethnic and cultural 'Greater Hungary'.

The predicament that the Romanian government is getting itself into over gender identity politics is already apparent. It recently drew the ire of nationalists, representative clergy and even members of the coalition, when it introduced a new identity card that had a designation for GEN rather than SEX. The document was quickly withdrawn.

 

[Plain Jane]

Media, Holocaust bills test Poland's ties with US, Israel

Poland is facing a more difficult relationship with two of its key allies after lawmakers passed two bills which the government had been warned to drop.

apnews.com

Media, Holocaust bills test Poland’s ties with US, Israel
By VANESSA GERAyesterday



1 of 8
People protest outside the Polish parliament after lawmakers passed a bill seen as harmful to media freedom in Warsaw, Poland, Aug. 11, 2021. Poland's parliament voted Wednesday in favor of a bill that would force Discovery Inc., the U.S. owner of Poland's largest private television network, to sell its Polish holdings and is widely viewed as an attack on media independence in Poland. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland is looking at a more difficult relationship with two allies, the United States and Israel, after lawmakers approved separate bills — on foreign ownership of media and affecting the property rights of Holocaust survivors’ families — which the Polish government had been warned to drop.

The European Union also slammed the media bill on Thursday as undermining media freedom, adding to pre-existing strains between Warsaw and Brussels from the EU’s perception of democratic backsliding in member nation Poland.

The bills passed the lower house of the Polish parliament on Wednesday, and still require approval of the president, who supports the right-wing party that has governed the country since 2015.

The two proposals threaten to further isolate Poland, whose geographic position in Central Europe has often left it at the mercy of stronger neighbors. Poland’s membership of the EU and NATO and its relationship with the U.S. are considered key guarantees of the country’s security.


One of the bills that passed would push Discovery Inc., the U.S. owner of Poland’s largest private television network, to sell its large and popular Polish network, TVN. It follows the state broadcasting authority’s ongoing refusal to renew the license for TVN’s all-news station TVN24, which expires in September.

Discovery accused Poland of violating a U.S.-Polish investment treaty, and said it notified the Polish government on Thursday that it was initiating legal action at an international arbitration court over the “discriminatory campaign.”

“We are deeply committed to safeguarding our investment in Poland and its people, defending the public’s interest in independent media and the rights of freedom of expression,” said Jean-Briac Perrette, the president of Discovery International, adding that “we will aggressively defend our rights.”

The other bill in an administrative amendment which would result in former owners, including Holocaust survivors and their descendants, from regaining property expropriated by the country’s communist regime.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement late Wednesday about what he called the “troubling legislation.”

“These pieces of legislation run counter to the principles and values for which modern, democratic nations stand,” Blinken said.

Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki responded Thursday by suggesting the U.S. officials do not understand the Polish bills and should analyze them more closely.

On the media bill, Morawiecki said: “We do not have any intentions regarding a specific television channel. It is just about tightening the regulations so that there is no situation in which companies from outside the European Union would freely buy media in Poland.”

The media bill triggered nationwide protests Tuesday. Among the participants expressing fear that their right to independent information was under attack were older Poles who remember the censorship of the communist era.

By contrast, the law which would affect the former property owners — both Jewish and non-Jewish — got almost no media coverage in Poland. But it sparked a fast and angry response from Israel, with Foreign Minister Yair Lapid saying it “damages both the memory of the Holocaust and the rights of its victims.”

The EU Commission said it will follow the media issue very closely while the head of the EU’s top watchdog for democratic values, Vera Jourova, tweeted that the foreign ownership bill sends a negative signal.

“Media pluralism and diversity of opinions are what strong democracies welcome, not fight against,” Jourova wrote. “We need a #MediaFreedomAct in the whole EU to uphold media freedom and support the rule of law.”

European Parliament President David Sassoli also weighed in on the media vote, calling it “very worrying” and said if it comes into force, “it will seriously threaten independent television in the country.”

Michael Roth, a German government member in charge of European affairs, said “democracy and the rule of law need critical and free media like the air to breathe. Laws should protect a colorful, diverse media landscape and not restrict it — and that everywhere in the EU.”

The development looked to many like a crucial move in a step-by-step dismantling of the democratic standards that Poland embraced when it threw off communism in 1989.

Hungary had already set the trail for such an illiberal political direction, and the EU has shown little ability so far to do much to ensure adherence to its values either there or in Poland, both previously models of democratic transformation.

After communism ended more than three decades ago, many foreign investors entered Poland’s media market. Poland’s ruling party, led by the country’s de facto leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has long seen this as a problem and sought to “repolonize” the media. The party argues that keeping Polish entities in control of the media is a matter of national security and that such regulations are in line with Western European standards.

However, the party’s critics see the efforts to nationalize media as a pretext for silencing independent voices. The effort is well on its way. Soon after winning power in 2015, Law and Justice transformed tax-funded public media into a party mouthpiece. Last year the state oil company bought a large German-owned private media group and has since moved to change the editors.
___
Raf Casert in Brussels and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed.

 

[Plain Jane]

Germany to fly out Afghanistan embassy staff – DW – 08/13/2021

Senior German politicians have raised the alarm about another refugee crisis if the West does not fund regional camps. The German journalists’ association has also appealed for the rescue of Afghan reporters.

www.dw.com

Afghanistan: Germany to cut Kabul embassy staff to 'minimum'
Senior German politicians have raised the alarm about another refugee crisis if the West does not fund regional camps. The German journalists’ association has also appealed for the rescue of Afghan reporters.



Watch video00:32
Germany to speed up evacuation of Afghan staff
Germany will reduce the number of staff at its Kabul embassy to the "absolute minimum," Foreign Minister Heiko Mass said Friday as Taliban forces set their sights on the Afghan capital.

The announcement came as more German lawmakers appeal for quick action to get staff out of Afghanistan. Senior Christian Democratic Union (CDU) lawmaker Norbert Röttgen urged the German authorities to "not abandon a single local employee" in danger of "torture and death."
It also comes as the German Federation of Journalists asked for Afghan journalists to be granted residence.

What did Maas say?
After the Taliban took the second and third largest cities in Afghanistan, Germany is looking to safeguard its citizens and embassy staff on the ground in the war-torn country's capital city.
"We will reduce personnel of the German embassy in Kabul in the coming days to the operative absolute minimum," Maas told journalists.

"We will send a crisis support team to Kabul to help us boost security precautions," the foreign minister added.

With the Taliban looking to set their sights on Afghan capital soon, Maas said he had decided to bring forward "charter flights planned for this month" to evacuate Germans and some Afghan workers out of Kabul.

Watch video06:10
Did the NATO mission in Afghanistan fail?
Maas said local embassy staff would be given a visa on arrival in Germany to "speed up the departure process." The embassy will continue to function for the moment.

He told all German citizens who were not part of the army or "designated personnel" to "leave the country now." An estimated 100 German citizens — not including those sent by the German government — are still in Afghanistan.

How have other German politicians reacted?
Norbert Röttgen, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag, Germany's lower house of parliament, tweeted his support for those who had helped the country in the last 20 years.

"The Taliban keep advancing every day," Röttgen said on his personal Twitter account. "We must not abandon a single staff member who has supported us in Afghanistan!"
"These people are counting on us because torture and death await them in Afghanistan. Red tape can be deadly now," he warned.

In an interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel, Röttgen said "millions" of refugees could now be forced to leave Afghanistan. Politicians believe that many of them could try to find their way to Europe.


Watch video02:23
Fleeing the Taliban - but where to?
Röttgen's concerns were shared by fellow CDU lawmaker Thorsten Frei, who spoke of supporting a localized solution, so as to avoid a similar situation as with Syria in 2014.
"Refugee camps in the region were dramatically underfunded, which is why hundreds of thousands made their way to Europe," Frei said.
"Should the Taliban gain control of the country, we must do everything we can so neighboring countries and the international aid organizations are enabled to take care of the Afghan refugees," Frei told Der Spiegel.

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who suspended deportation flights to Afghanistan on Wednesday, said a large "refugee flow" could cause the country "great grief," in the Der Spiegel story.

What will happen with Afghan journalists?
The German Federation of Journalists (DJV) said on Friday that it would like to see the government give Afghan reporters visas.

"Germany must not stand idly by while our colleagues are persecuted or even murdered," said DJV Federal Chairman Frank Überall.

"Without informants and translators on site, the German media would not have had a line to write or a minute to broadcast about Afghanistan in recent years, " he said.
More than 1,200 reporters have already lost their jobs in the country with many of them killed in targeted executions, the International Federation of Journalists has reported.

"The [German] publishers and broadcasters have to live up to their responsibility in the current emergency situation," Überall said.
jc/rs (Reuters, AFP, dpa)

 

[Plain Jane]

Thousands march against French Covid health pass for fifth week in a row

Protesters have marched in cities across France for a fifth consecutive weekend against rules compelling them to show a COVID-19 health pass for dailyactivities, but in lesser numbers than a week ago.

www.france24.com

Thousands march against French Covid health pass for fifth week in a row
Issued on: 14/08/2021 - 17:50

People take part in a march organised by the French nationalist party "Les Patriotes" (The Patriots) as part of a national day of protest against the compulsory Covid-19 vaccination for certain workers, and the mandatory use of the health pass called for by the French government to access most public spaces, in Paris on August 14, 2021 © Sameer Al-Doumy, AFP
Text by:NEWS WIRES
4 min

Protesters have marched in cities across France for a fifth consecutive weekend against rules compelling them to show a COVID-19 health pass for dailyactivities, but in lesser numbers than a week ago.
ADVERTISING

They rallied through the streets of Paris, Marseille, Nice, Montpellier and other towns waving placards reading "Pass=Apartheid" and chanting "Freedom, freedom".

Since last Monday, citizens have been required to show the pass in public places, proving that they have been vaccinated or have recently been tested negative for the coronavirus.

After a week of leniency from the police, the government has vowed to get tougher on health pass checks. And testing, unless prescribed by a doctor, will no longer be free from October.


France health pass: How does it work?

01:37
The protests have united a disparate group against President Emmanuel Macron's legislation, which is meant to help contain a fourth wave of COVID-19 infections spreading across France and help safeguard the country's economic recovery.

The total number of participants in the latest protests had diminished to almost 215,000, according to the interior ministry, after a steady rise from 114,000 on the first Saturday of protest on July 17 to 237,000 on Aug. 7.
Authorities had initially anticipated that the 217 overwhelmingly peaceful rallies around the country would total around 250,000 demonstrators.

The number of people being treated for COVID-19 in intensive care units has more than doubled in less than a month, standing at 1,831 as of Friday. That's less than a third of the third lockdown peak of 6,001, but high enough to trigger restrictive measures in certain areas.

The number of people treated for COVID-19 in intensive care units has more than doubled in less than a month, standing at 1,831 as of Friday, a figure more than three times lower than the third lockdown peak of 6,001, but high enough to trigger new restrictive measures in certain areas.

Health Ministry data showed nine in every 10 COVID patients recently admitted to intensive care had not been vaccinated. A majority of French support the health pass, surveys show.
Among the protesters are remnants of the anti-government "Yellow Vest" movement that shook Macron's leadership during 2018-2019, and also other citizens who are anti-vaccine or consider the health pass to be discriminatory.

Vaccination rates jumped after Macron unveiled his health pass plans last month. Almost 70% of all French people have now received one dose and 57.5% are fully vaccinated.
(REUTERS)

 

[Plain Jane]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

A Message From France

BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, AUG 15, 2021 - 08:10 AM
Authored by 'Hardscrabble Farmer' via The Burning Platform,
Here in France it has gone to the extreme with the “Health” Pass.
Last week on the 21st ALL restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and any leisure activities like sporting events, theaters, cinemas, museums, were closed to anyone without “the pass” and all staff at these places are mandated to get the jab to keep their job.


It is now a 6 Month prison sentence if you are caught inside any of these places without the pass (the man who slapped the president in the face got only 3 months prison time).

Business owners will get a fine of 45,000 euros and 1 year prison sentence if they do not comply with the use of “the pass” and force all their employees to get the jab. (If you know France, you can commit murder and have less of a sentence)

So the result? All the low paid employees quit, they can make more on welfare here (for now). We can still technically “get take out food” but I just tried last night and every restaurant in our town (that is dine in with take out) has closed their doors due to the lack of staff.

As of last week ALL doctors, nurses and health industry workers have been mandated to get the jab or lose their license, practice, job, business etc. (ALL health care here is Govt paid positions and there are no private health care Doctors or Hospitals etc.)

Since the Health care system is state run and funded, it has been run into the ground. All the good doctors left France 5 Years ago, all the hospitals look like they are 3rd world hospitals since there is no money to repair them, half of the equipment doesn’t work and not every hospital is stocked with supplies needed for daily needs (masks, gels, disposable gowns etc).

For 5 years Nurses have been understaffed and doing double the work because the Health care system is nearly bankrupt…. So add to this the mandatory jab.

So the result? Well they took to the streets by the millions and now all the hospitals just lost another 50% of staff capacity.

My doctor just went into early retirement (a.k.a. he quit) and I have yet to find a replacement.
As of Aug 1st ALL large malls, retail stores and grocery store owners and their staff need to be jabbed and the health pass is required to enter for employees and customers. This would be the equivalent to closing ALL Targets, Walmarts, Costcos, Home Depots, and all major grocery stores. (basically any building over 20,000 squre meters) to those without “the pass”.
Result.?? Aug 15th Truckers will be going on strike nation wide; Blocking all access roads in and out of Paris.

Yesterday an entire airport in Northern France closed due to the majority of staff quitting.
As of Sept 15th All public areas and access will be off limits.

No farmers markets, no parks, no national parks, lakes, rivers, beaches, recreation areas, campsites etc. and no gathering over 100 people, no churches, no weddings, etc.
As of Oct 1st ALL small vendors such as, delis, pizza trucks, sandwich shops, butchers, bakers, vegetable stands etc.

So as of Oct 1st I will only be able to purchase food by internet and pick up (if allowed).
Food shortages, Truckers strike, hospitals and airports shutting down unemployment going through the roof. Its going to be a bumpy ride folks.

Is it me or does all this seem a bit extreme for a “pass” that isn’t exactly working?
America, Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, you’d better wake up.

 

[mzkitty]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

A Message From France

BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, AUG 15, 2021 - 08:10 AM
Authored by 'Hardscrabble Farmer' via The Burning Platform,
Here in France it has gone to the extreme with the “Health” Pass.
Last week on the 21st ALL restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and any leisure activities like sporting events, theaters, cinemas, museums, were closed to anyone without “the pass” and all staff at these places are mandated to get the jab to keep their job.


It is now a 6 Month prison sentence if you are caught inside any of these places without the pass (the man who slapped the president in the face got only 3 months prison time).

Business owners will get a fine of 45,000 euros and 1 year prison sentence if they do not comply with the use of “the pass” and force all their employees to get the jab. (If you know France, you can commit murder and have less of a sentence)

So the result? All the low paid employees quit, they can make more on welfare here (for now). We can still technically “get take out food” but I just tried last night and every restaurant in our town (that is dine in with take out) has closed their doors due to the lack of staff.

As of last week ALL doctors, nurses and health industry workers have been mandated to get the jab or lose their license, practice, job, business etc. (ALL health care here is Govt paid positions and there are no private health care Doctors or Hospitals etc.)

Since the Health care system is state run and funded, it has been run into the ground. All the good doctors left France 5 Years ago, all the hospitals look like they are 3rd world hospitals since there is no money to repair them, half of the equipment doesn’t work and not every hospital is stocked with supplies needed for daily needs (masks, gels, disposable gowns etc).

For 5 years Nurses have been understaffed and doing double the work because the Health care system is nearly bankrupt…. So add to this the mandatory jab.

So the result? Well they took to the streets by the millions and now all the hospitals just lost another 50% of staff capacity.

My doctor just went into early retirement (a.k.a. he quit) and I have yet to find a replacement.
As of Aug 1st ALL large malls, retail stores and grocery store owners and their staff need to be jabbed and the health pass is required to enter for employees and customers. This would be the equivalent to closing ALL Targets, Walmarts, Costcos, Home Depots, and all major grocery stores. (basically any building over 20,000 squre meters) to those without “the pass”.
Result.?? Aug 15th Truckers will be going on strike nation wide; Blocking all access roads in and out of Paris.

Yesterday an entire airport in Northern France closed due to the majority of staff quitting.
As of Sept 15th All public areas and access will be off limits.

No farmers markets, no parks, no national parks, lakes, rivers, beaches, recreation areas, campsites etc. and no gathering over 100 people, no churches, no weddings, etc.
As of Oct 1st ALL small vendors such as, delis, pizza trucks, sandwich shops, butchers, bakers, vegetable stands etc.

So as of Oct 1st I will only be able to purchase food by internet and pick up (if allowed).
Food shortages, Truckers strike, hospitals and airports shutting down unemployment going through the roof. Its going to be a bumpy ride folks.

Is it me or does all this seem a bit extreme for a “pass” that isn’t exactly working?
America, Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, you’d better wake up.

As the French would say -- "Mon Dieu, et merde !!"

Wow, Jane, I wondered why you posted so late in the day............ have they killed him yet?

 

[Plain Jane]

As the French would say -- "Mon Dieu, et merde !!"

Wow, Jane, I wondered why you posted so late in the day............ have they killed him yet?

Clif High thinks he'll be run out of office. If that article isn't hyperbole, Clif could be right!

 

[mzkitty]

Clif High thinks he'll be run out of office. If that article isn't hyperbole, Clif could be right!

The people have been demanding that for quite a while now, but no action yet.

 

[Plain Jane]

Germany sends evacuation planes to Kabul – DW – 08/15/2021

Military aircraft will leave Germany for Kabul on Sunday night to evacuate Germans and Afghan support staff after Taliban insurgents entered the Afghan capital.

www.dw.com

Germany sending military planes to Afghanistan for evacuation
Military aircraft will leave Germany for Kabul on Sunday night to evacuate Germans and Afghan support staff after Taliban insurgents entered the Afghan capital.




Germany is doubling down on efforts to evacuate diplomatic staff, Heiko Maas said
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said that Bundeswehr planes are being deployed to help with evacuation efforts in Kabul.

In a brief statement to reporters on Sunday evening, Maas said those who are being evacuated will be brought to a neighboring country and then will use civilian passenger planes to fly them back to Germany.

Some German staff will be flown out already on Sunday night, he said.

His comments follow the Taliban's advance on the Afghan capital in the previous few hours, as it prepares to retake control of the country.

Maas said that the security of the German embassy staff and local partners "is paramount."
Germany closed its embassy in Kabul earlier on Sunday, moving its staff to a location at Kabul airport, where Maas said the staff "are safe."

"A core team of the embassy will stay in Kabul at the airport to continue work there and support further evacuations," he added.

"It is now an absolute priority that we bring those to be protected safely to Germany," German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said regarding the evacuation efforts.

European Council President Charles Michel also said Sunday that the security of EU personnel and citizens in Afghanistan is "priority in the short term."


Watch video00:18
Afghan President Ghani has left country, says top official Abdullah
Commercial flights grounded
NATO and US military officials said commercial flights in and out of Kabul airport were grounded from Sunday night but that military flights, including evacuation flights, would continue.

The grounding followed reports of gunfire at the airport. The US Embassy warned its citizens to "shelter in place."
The US military also evacuated the acting US ambassador to the Kabul airport, The Associated Press reported.
At the end of June, Germany completed its pull out of its troops deployed in Afghanistan, ending its part in NATO operations in the country after nearly two decades.

Its contingent of 150,000 people who were stationed in the country over the years, made it the second biggest contributor of NATO troops there, after the US.

Bundestag member Roderich Kiesewetter, who sits on the foreign affairs committee, told DW that the Taliban's rapid advances in Afghanistan mark an "end of an era."

Kiesewetter laid blame on the Trump administration for its original decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and slammed corruption in the Afghan government, which had received both military and financial support from western countries.
rs, wd/mm (dpa, Reuters)

 

[Plain Jane]

Hundreds are evacuated as tinderbox Spain tackles wildfires

At least 800 people in Spain have been evacuated as forest fires were burning in two regions. Extremely dry conditions were worsening the fire risks during the hottest weekend of the year so far.

apnews.com

Hundreds are evacuated as tinderbox Spain tackles wildfires
By JENNIFER O'MAHONYyesterday



1 of 2
Emergency staff fights a fire on Castillo mountain park near Tivoli a few miles from Rome, Italy, Friday, Aug. 13, 2021. Intense heat baking Italy pushed northward towards the popular tourist destination of Florence Friday while wildfires charred the country's south, and Spain appeared headed for an all-time record high temperature as a heat wave kept southern Europe in a fiery hold. (Cecilia Fabiano/LaPresse via AP)

MADRID (AP) — At least 800 people were evacuated in Spain as forest fires blazed Sunday in two regions, with extremely dry conditions worsening the risk of more wildfires during the hottest weekend of the year so far.

Two planes, a helicopter and almost 200 firefighers were dispatched to the province of Ávila in central Spain to tackle two separate fires there, Spain’s Military Emergencies Unit said in a tweet. Relative humidity fell as low as 8% in Ávila, according to Spain’s State Meteorological Agency, leading to tinderbox conditions.

Images released by firefighters in the region showed planes dumping water onto blazing agricultural buildings, while the Spanish Red Cross tweeted pictures of first responders bringing elderly residents to safety.

The Castile and León regional government evacuated citizens from several villages. The private Europe Press agency reported that more than 500 people were taken to a sports facility to shelter from the blaze as it decimated 5,000 hectares (12,400 acres) of forest.

Jesús Martín, the mayor of Solosancho, one of the villages affected, told Europa Press: “Our mountains have been burned. It’s a horrible sensation. Everything is black.”

Meanwhile in Spain’s eastern Valencia region, an electrical storm triggered a fire that forced the evacuation of Azuébar, a village of 300 people, according to the local government in Castellón. The military emergency unit sent two helicopters and a plane to tackle the blaze.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez tweeted: “Solidarity to the evacuated residents, I can imagine their pain and worry,” and thanked the emergency services tackling the fires.

On Saturday, Spain set a new provisional heat record of 47.2 degrees Celsius (116.96 Fahrenheit) at Montoro, Cordoba, as much of Southern Europe sweltered under a relentless summer sun. If confirmed, that would exceed the country’s previous record of 46.9 degrees Celsius (116.42 F), set nearby in July 2017.

Climate scientists say there is little doubt that climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas is driving more extreme events — such as heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods and storms — as the Earth warms.
___
Read more of AP’s climate coverage at Climate change.

 

[Plain Jane]

Thousands evacuated in French Riviera due to forest fire

French President Emmanuel Macron says firefighters have been able to “stabilize” a wildfire that is racing through forests near the French Riviera.

apnews.com

Thousands evacuated as fire sweeps through French forests
an hour ago


PARIS (AP) — Hundreds of firefighters on Tuesday battled a fire racing through forests near the French Riviera that forced the evacuation of thousands of people from homes and vacation spots.
Two firefighters have been injured in the blaze that started Monday evening inland from the coastal city of Toulon, civil security service spokesman Alexandre Jouassard said.

Fueled by powerful Mediterranean winds, the fire had consumed some 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres) of forest by Tuesday morning, according to the administration for the surrounding Var region.

Some 6,000 people have been evacuated from homes in the region and a dozen campgrounds, and vacationers were locked down in a holiday center for Air France employees.

Backed by water-dumping planes and helicopters, more than 900 firefighters worked Tuesday to contain the blaze, the civil security service said. Local authorities blocked access to forest across the region and urged caution.

Fierce forest fires have swept across southern Europe and North Africa in recent weeks.

 

[Plain Jane]

Germany frets about refugees – DW – 08/17/2021

Just weeks before a general election, German politicians are worried that large numbers of Afghan refugees might make their way to Europe. The wave of mostly Syrian refugees who came in 2015 still haunts German politics.

www.dw.com

German politicians fret about refugees from Afghanistan 
Just weeks before a general election, German politicians are worried that large numbers of Afghan refugees might make their way to Europe. The wave of mostly Syrian refugees who came in 2015 still haunts German politics.




Large numbers of Afghans have fled the approaching Taliban

Before Chancellor Angela Merkel said anything about the dramatic events in Afghanistan, many of her colleagues were already turning their attention to what the Taliban's return to power there might mean on the ground here in Germany.
"The mistakes regarding the Syrian civil war must not be made again," Armin Laschet, the chancellor candidate for the center-right CDU/CSU in September's general elections, tweeted as the Taliban took Kabul on Sunday. "2015 shall not be repeated."

Laschet, the leader of Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), was referring to the more than 1 million people who fled war-ravaged countries and found their way to European borders in 2015. Syrians were the largest contingent, and many of them settled in Germany after Merkel's famous "Wir schaffen das!" (we can do this) comment saw borders remaining open.

Those events left a lasting impact on German politics as the country has struggled with issues of immigration and integration. For decades, it has been a top destination for asylum-seekers.
Despite the initial warm welcome in 2015, anti-migrant sentiment helped turn the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) into a political force nationwide. Following general elections in 2017, it became the largest opposition party in the Bundestag, the German parliament.



Watch video01:24
Afghanistan: Evacuations of diplomats, civilians resume

2015 'repeat' on repeat 
Laschet's position, which he reiterated at a news conference on Monday, was echoed by some of his conservative party colleagues. The AfD's parliamentary leader, Alice Weidel, picked up the line, as well.

"2015 must not be allowed to repeat itself," she wrote on Twitter on Monday. "Genuine refugees must be helped in their home region if possible."

More moderate political voices are also behind the idea of lending third countries closer to Afghanistan more support to host refugees.

"We most of all need to help neighboring states, should Afghan refugees come," Merkel said on Monday evening, during a news conference about the dire turn of events in Afghanistan.

Her deputy, Olaf Scholz, who is running as the chancellor candidate for the Social Democrats (SPD), told his audience at a campaign event on Monday that Turkey, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq could serve as places for refugee settlement.

Germany should "now immediately ensure that integration prospects exist there, that one can stay there, that one can gain a secure future there," he said.

Watch video00:56
'It's a terrible development for those who want a more liberal society'
Any refugee response comes less than one week after Germany and other European countries stopped deportations to Afghanistan and after months of the German government dragging its feet to resettle thousands of Afghans who put their lives at risk working for the German military and other agencies. Many of them remain in Afghanistan, fates uncertain.

"It's a moral failure of the German government not to have looked after the local employees," Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, a lawmaker with the pro-free market Free Democrats (FDP), told DW. "On the other hand, as Europe and as Germany, we do not have an obligation to take in all the refugees."

Annalena Baerbock, the chancellor candidate for the more pro-refugee Greens, appealed to Western nations. Rather than wait for all 27 members of the European Union to find agreement, she told public broadcaster DLF it would be "enough to work with the European countries that want to, and especially the Americans and Canadians."

With the outcome of next month's elections far from clear, any issue could tip the balance that decides which parties constitute Germany's next federal government. Migration has made fewer headlines in the past few years, but it remains a top voter issue, according to a survey from the Allensbach Institute in May. Events in Afghanistan raise the possibility of it coming to the fore in the final weeks of campaigning.

The fire in Europe's largest refugee camp in Greece brought people in Germany onto the streets in protest last year

2021 isn't 2015, Afghanistan isn't Syria
"Instead of spreading fear and panic, and conjuring up a refugee wave, Germany — as one of the richest countries in the world — should lead by example by taking in refugees from Afghanistan and giving them a chance to stay," Lotta Schwedler, a spokeswoman for the Refugee Council of Brandenburg, told DW in a statement.

The only "mistake" from 2015 to avoid, she added, is housing refugees in "inhumane conditions" for months on end.

Afghans were the biggest group of asylum-seekers after Syrians in the 2015 wave, which has often been framed as a one-off humanitarian emergency. The EU struggled in the years since to find a common policy on refugee distribution and settlement across the bloc.

A multibillion-euro deal with Turkey has all but guaranteed that the country holds on to its refugee populations. Logistical support for Libya and other North African countries helps keep people there — and sometimes haul them back — despite abuses documented by human rights groups. The EU's border agency, Frontex, has seen its budget grow every year; the bloc's external borders, and those of its neighbors, are more tightly guarded.

"It's appalling that the first reaction to the suffering and atrocities we can, unfortunately, expect again in Afghanistan is isolation — that the main thing is that people don't come to us," Wiebke Judith, a legal policy adviser for Pro Asyl, a German refugee aid organization, told DW.

The mistake in 2015, she added, was the lack of solidarity within the EU.

Afghanistan is much farther from Europe than Syria, and people fleeing conflict rarely show up immediately, if at all. Many of those who arrived in 2015 spent years elsewhere in their region.

Afghans have long composed one of the world's largest refugee populations, according to the UN Refugee Agency, settling mostly in Iran and Pakistan and other South Asian countries. At least 3.5 million Afghans are internally displaced, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.

"We're not yet seeing a comparison to 2015," Judith said. "You get the feeling that such comparisons want to distract from Germany's political failure, which has become dramatically apparent."

 

[Melodi]

The "mistake" is not moving in several German-speaking, highly motivated, and loyal translators (along with their families) into Germany.

The Mistake (and I heard this directly from a German social worker for which this was his day job) was allowing in hordes of military-aged men who walked into Europe as Economic Migrants. Young men who thought they would get 3,000 Euros a month for life, a free apartment, and a free car only to discover they were not even allowed to do construction work without knowing German and passing a two-year apprenticeship (in German).

He said the few women who came with them (in that wave) mostly stayed at home and were difficult even for women social workers to access; and that many of the young men would get bored after a few months and most refused to really learn German or try to integrate into German society in any way.

I wouldn't worry nearly as much about a few hundred (maybe even a couple of thousand) men with families who already speak German and had aided the German armed forces. I would still watch them carefully for a few years, but for one thing, they could take the apprenticeship programs right away (which in Germany are very good and respected) to get certified for employment within a year or two.

The Germans did make a huge mistake (as did the Swedes, Danes, and others) but bringing in these translators is kind of like apples and oranges.

Now other refugees may be an issue, but again apples and oranges.

 

[Plain Jane]

UK's Johnson accused of complacency over Afghanistan retreat

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has faced accusations of needlessly abandoning Afghanistan to the whims of the Taliban and of undermining Britain’s position in the world.

apnews.com

UK’s Johnson accused of complacency over Afghanistan retreat
By PAN PYLAS and SYLVIA HUIyesterday



1 of 13
Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks during the debate on the situation in Afghanistan inside parliament in London, as lawmakers attend an emergency sitting three days after the Afghanistan capital Kabul fell to the Taliban. Nearly all ruling Conservative Party lawmakers were not wearing face masks during the debate Wednesday, while opposition Labour Party lawmakers sat in parliament nearly all wearing face masks. (House of Commons via AP)

LONDON (AP) — In a packed, emotional session of Parliament, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced accusations Wednesday from lawmakers across the political spectrum of needlessly abandoning Afghanistan to the whims of the Taliban and of undermining Britain’s position in the world.

The members of Parliament were recalled from their summer break to attend the emergency session in London. Many, including a large number from Johnson’s Conservative Party, voiced strong regrets and fears at the chaotic turn of events in Afghanistan, where the Taliban have seized control 20 years after being driven from power by a U.S.-led international force following the 9/11 attacks.

Johnson said he had little choice but to follow the decision of U.S. President Joe Biden to take American troops out of Afghanistan by the end of August.

“The West could not continue this U.S.-led mission, a mission conceived and executed in support of America, without American logistics, without U.S. air power and without American might,” he said.

“I really think that it is an illusion to believe that there is appetite amongst any of our partners for a continued military presence or for a military solution imposed by NATO in Afghanistan,” he added.

The Taliban used the impending withdrawal of all remaining NATO forces to rapidly sweep through Afghanistan, reaching Kabul on Sunday, a stunning advance that was faster than anticipated, if not unexpected. Thousands of people have fled to Kabul Airport in a desperate attempt to flee as Western nations evacuate citizens and Afghan employees.

“There’s been a major miscalculation of the resilience of the Afghan forces and a staggering complacency from our government about the Taliban threat,” said Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party.

Some of the most pointed interventions during the debate came from Johnson’s Conservative ranks, notably his predecessor Theresa May, who asked whether Johnson had hoped “on a wing and a prayer it’d be all right on the night.”

“We boast about global Britain, but where is global Britain on the streets of Kabul?” she asked. “A successful foreign policy strategy will be judged by our deeds, not by our words.”

With the Taliban now in charge of Afghanistan, the immediate priority of the British government is to evacuate the 4,000 or so U.K. citizens still in Afghanistan and the thousands of Afghans who have helped the U.K. over the past 20 years.

Johnson said a new “generous” refugee settlement program would allow up to 20,000 vulnerable Afghans, primarily women and children, to seek sanctuary in the U.K. in the next few years, including 5,000 this year. The total for this year is in addition to the 5,000 or so Afghan allies that the U.K. is now trying to evacuate from Kabul’s international airport.

Johnson said the U.K. would work to unite the international community behind a “clear plan for dealing with the Taliban.” The prime minister, who is the current president of the Group of Seven wealthy democracies, said he aimed to convene a meeting of the G-7 leaders in the coming days.

“We are clear, and we have agreed that it’d be a mistake for any country to recognize any new regime in Kabul prematurely or bilaterally,” said Johnson, who spoke with Biden and other world leaders on Afghanistan in recent days.

“We will judge this regime on the choices it makes and by its actions, rather than its words,” he added.

The refugee plan, which is similar to a refugee package for Syria in 2015, came under immediate attack from lawmakers and activists, who said it fell short of what was required and did not come close to matching Britain’s responsibility.
“I have no words for it. This could have been so avoided,” Paul Farthing, an ex-Marine who runs an animal sanctuary in Kabul, told the AP. “We have destroyed this country and I don’t see anybody regretting what they’ve done.”

Farthing is lobbying for the British government to take in 25 Afghans who work for his charity, including young female veterinarians in their 20s. “What’s their future going to be? They are probably going to end up being married to Taliban fighters ... Are you telling me that the West is OK with that? Because that’s what we’ve just created.”

Johnson said authorities had so far secured the safe return of 306 British citizens and 2,052 Afghans. Britain’s ambassador to Kabul, Laurie Bristow, said his team helped 700 people fly out on military flights on Tuesday, and the goal is to help 1,000 people get out each day. He said he’s got “days, not weeks” to speed up the evacuation operation.

Bristow said the Taliban is supporting the operation and his team is working with them “where we need to, at a tactical, practical level.”

For many U.K. lawmakers, Britain’s withdrawal represents a huge failure for the Afghanistan mission, which saw 457 British troops die in the effort to stabilize the nation.

“Let’s stop talking about forever wars. Let’s recognize that forever peace is bought not cheaply, but hard through determination and the will to endure,” said lawmaker Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the influential Foreign Affairs Committee and a former soldier who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

While the lawmakers were debating the crisis in Afghanistan, dozens of former translators for the British Army protested outside Parliament, holding banners and signs that included images of people gravely injured in Afghanistan with the caption “Protect our loved ones.”

Dozens more people joined the translators, leading to a crowd of around 200. Women and children came bearing posters, red balloons and flags of Afghanistan painted on their cheeks.
___

 

[Plain Jane]

Allies embraced Biden. Did Kabul lay bare "great illusion"?

When U.S. President Joe Biden took office early this year, Western allies were falling over themselves to welcome and praise him, and hail a new era in trans-Atlantic cooperation.

apnews.com

Allies embraced Biden. Did Kabul lay bare “great illusion”?
By RAF CASERTyesterday



1 of 9
FILE - In this June 14, 2021 file photo, President Joe Biden and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg speak while visiting a memorial to the September 11 terrorist attacks at NATO headquarters in Brussels. When U.S. President Joe Biden took office early this year, Western allies were falling over themselves to welcome and praise him and hail a new era in trans-Atlantic cooperation. The collapse of Kabul certainly put a stop to that. Even some of his biggest fans are now churning out criticism. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

BRUSSELS (AP) — Well before U.S. President Joe Biden took office early this year, the European Union’s foreign policy chief sang his praises and hailed a new era in cooperation. So did almost all of Washington’s Western allies.

The EU’s Josep Borrell was glad to see the end of the Trump era, with its America First, and sometimes America Only policy, enthralled by Biden’s assertion that he would “lead, not merely by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.”

Sunday’s collapse of Kabul, triggered by Biden’s decision to get out of Afghanistan and a U.S. military unable to contain the chaos since, certainly put a stop to that. Even some of his biggest fans are now churning out criticism.

Borrell was among them, this time aghast at Biden’s contention that “our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation-building,” coming in the wake of Western efforts over much of the past two decades to sow the seeds of the rule of law and assure protection for women and minorities.


“State-building was not the purpose? Well, this is arguable,” a dejected Borrell said of Biden’s stance, which has come under criticism in much of Europe.

And for many Europeans steeped in soft power diplomacy to export Western democratic values, Biden’s assertion that, “our only vital national interest in Afghanistan remains today what it has always been: preventing a terrorist attack on American homeland,” could have come from a Trump speech.

EU Council President Charles Michel underscored the different stances when he said in a tweet Thursday that the “rights of Afghanis, notably women & girls, will remain our key concern: all EU instruments to support them should be used.”

French Parliamentarian Nathalie Loiseau, a former Europe minister for President Emmanuel Macron, put the unexpected EU-Biden disconnect more bluntly: “We lived a little bit the great illusion,” she said. “We thought America was back, while in fact, America withdraws.”

It was no better in Germany, where a leading member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Union bloc, Bavaria Gov. Markus Soeder, called on Washington to provide funding and shelter to those fleeing Afghanistan, since “the United States of America bear the main responsibility for the current situation.”

Even in the United Kingdom, which has always prided itself on a its “special relationship” with Washington and now, more than ever, needs U.S. goodwill to overcome the impact of leaving the EU, barbs were coming from all angles.
Former British Army chief Richard Dannatt said, “the manner and timing of the Afghan collapse is the direct result of President Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of 9/11.”


“At a stroke, he has undermined the patient and painstaking work of the last five, 10, 15 years to build up governance in Afghanistan, develop its economy, transform its civil society and build up its security forces,” Dannatt said Wednesday in Parliament.

“The people had a glimpse of a better life — but that has been torn away.”

Biden has pointed to the Trump administration deal negotiated with the Taliban 18 months earlier in Doha, Qatar, which he says bound him to withdraw U.S. troops, as setting the stage for the chaos now engulfing the country.

Still, Biden putting much of the blame on Afghan forces for not protecting their nation has not gone down well with Western allies, either.

Conservative Parliament member Tom Tugendhat, who fought in Afghanistan, was one of several British lawmakers taking offense.

“To see their commander-in-chief call into question the courage of men I fought with, to claim that they ran, is shameful,” Tugendhat said.

Chris Bryant, from the opposition Labour Party, called Biden’s remarks about Afghan soldiers, “some of the most shameful comments ever from an American president.”

In Prague this week, Czech president Milos Zeman said that, “by withdrawing from Afghanistan, the Americans have lost their status of global leader.”

But despite all the criticism, there is no doing without the United States on the global stage. America remains vital to the Western allies in a series of other issues, in particular taking action against global warming.

After climate change disasters across much of the globe this year, the EU will be counting heavily on Biden to stand shoulder-to- shoulder in taking effective measures at the November COP26 global conference in Glasgow, Scotland, to speed up action to counter global warming.

Europe and Washington also have enough trade disagreements to settle to realize that despite the debacle of Afghanistan, there is much more that unites than divides them. A need for American power and help remains, even in Afghanistan.

Before Friday’s meeting of NATO foreign ministers, some Alliance nations have acknowledged they will be pleading to Washington to stay even longer in Afghanistan than it will take to bring all U.S. citizens home, wanting to make sure their people get out too.

“We and a number of other countries are going to the Americans to say: ‘Stay as long as possible, possibly longer than necessary,’” Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs Sigrid Kaag said.
____
Associated Press writers Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands; Sylvia Hui in London; Karel Janicek in Prague and Colleen Barry in Milan contributed.

See this thread also:

WAR - US to leave troops in Afghanistan beyond May, 9/11 new goal

US to leave troops in Afghanistan beyond May, 9/11 new goal by: Associated Press Posted: Apr 13, 2021 / 10:34 AM MDT / Updated: Apr 13, 2021 / 10:34 AM MDT US President Joe...

www.timebomb2000.com

 

[Plain Jane]

Merkel asks Russia to pressure Taliban on evacuations – DW – 08/20/2021

In probably her last meeting with Vladimir Putin as German chancellor, Angela Merkel urged Russia to communicate with the Taliban the importance of evacuating civilians from Kabul.

www.dw.com

Merkel asks Russia to pressure Taliban on evacuations
In probably her last meeting with Vladimir Putin as German chancellor, Angela Merkel urged Russia to communicate with the Taliban the importance of evacuating civilians from Kabul.




Merkel met with Putin in probably her last visit as chancellor

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday asked Russian President Vladimir Putin for support in rescuing local Afghan forces after the Taliban takeover.

The remarks came during Merkel's trip to Moscow — likely the last in her capacity as chancellor as she is due to step down from politics following Germany's general election in September.

But it also came at a time of immense global strife, just days after the Taliban' seized control of Afghanistan, rising tensions in Ukraine, and with Russian dissidents sitting in jail
What did they say about Afghanistan?
The two leaders have had different ideas about the Taliban's capture of Kabul. Merkel has described the situation as "bitter, dramatic and terrifying."

Moscow, meanwhile, is seeking to open channels of communication with the Islamist group and appears to be looking to foster some sort of relationship with the Taliban.

Merkel called on Russia to communicate with the Taliban that there was willingness to work with the militant group on humanitarian grounds if they allow the safe evacuation of Western-allied Afghans.

"I have given information that we in Germany consider it most important to evacuate people who have worked for over 20 years for us. Those citizens of Afghanistan should receive a place to stay in Germany," Merkel said.

Putin called on the international community to prevent the "collapse" of Afghanistan.

"The Taliban movement control almost the entire territory of the country," he said. "These are the realities and it is from these realities that we must proceed, preventing the collapse of the Afghan state."

Merkel also alluded, in less direct terms, to the Taliban having established facts on the ground in recent days.

What about Navalny?
Merkel's visit comes one year since Putin's fiercest critic, Alexei Navalny, was poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent. Navalny was taken to Berlin for treatment. He later returned to Russia and was jailed on arrival, ostensibly for violating the terms of his bail on a prior conviction.

"I demanded from the Russian leader that he free Navalny," Merkel said. "And I made clear that we will keep doing that," she said, calling the situation around Navalny "distressing." Merkel also noted how the prior conviction had been deemed "unproportionate" by a European human rights court.

Putin has long denied ordering the poison attack and refuses to say Navalny's name in public. He referred to his challenger as "the defendant" who was behind bars "for criminal offenses."

"I would ask that the judicial decisions of the Russian Federation be treated with respect," he said.

Watch video03:13
Russian opposition a year after Navalny poisoning
And Ukraine?
Putin asked Merkel to work toward a peaceful solution to the conflict in eastern Ukraine, stressing that there was no alternative to the Minsk peace agreement.

Merkel — who is due to hold talks with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday — said there was a stalemate, and people continued to die.She added that she hoped for some progress to be made in the next few weeks.

Besides the armed conflict, Ukraine also opposes the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany, fearing that it would affect its status as a gas transit country.

Putin said Russia was ready to send gas via Ukraine even after the end of their current deal, in 2024, but said Moscow needed to evaluate the scale of demand for its fossil fuel first.

"And for this, we need to get an answer from our European partners on how much they are ready to buy," he said. "We cannot sign a transit contract if we don't have supply contracts with our consumers in Europe."

The pipeline is set to double natural gas supply between Russia and Germany

The end of an era?
Despite their strong political differences, the two have managed to keep lines of communication open over the years.

Some would argue that over 16 years of Merkel's leadership, it would have been difficult not to have fostered some type of working relationship.

The two are able to speak one another's languages fluently and their exchanges over the years have become talking points.

• 
  
  
  VLADIMIR PUTIN AND ANGELA MERKEL: THROUGH GOOD TIMES AND BAD
  Up-and-coming leaders
  In 2002, Angela Merkel was the head of what was then Germany's main opposition party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Putin was the fresh-faced president of a new and modern Russia. After meeting Putin in the Kremlin, Merkel reportedly joked to her aides that she had passed the "KGB test" of holding his gaze — an allusion to Putin's earlier career in the Soviet security agency.

Putin and his large black Labrador called Konni featured in one of the more memorable visits in 2007.

Merkel, who was once bitten by a dog, appeared visibly uneasy as the Russian president's dog casually strode in and gave the German chancellor a couple of sniffs.

"I think although the Russian president knew very well that I was not exactly eager to meet his dog, he brought it with him. But that's the way it was. And you can see how I was trying to stay brave, by looking in Putin's direction and not at the dog," she told German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung at the time.

In 2006, Putin had also given her a black and white stuffed toy dog as a gift.

Merkel's eye rolls, most prominently on display during talks with Putin at a summit in 2017, will no doubt also be missed in future exchanges between the two states.

fb, kb/msh (AFP, dpa, Reuters)

 

[Plain Jane]

Is Hungary's Orban striving for Huxit? – DW – 08/21/2021

Hungary's unofficial government paper "Magyar Nemzet" advocates Hungary's exit from the EU. Is Prime Minister Viktor Orban pulling the strings behind the scenes?

www.dw.com

Hungary vs EU: Is Orban striving for Huxit?
Hungary's unofficial government paper "Magyar Nemzet" advocates Hungary's exit from the EU. Is Prime Minister Viktor Orban pulling the strings behind the scenes?




The English version of the "Magyar Nemzet" Huxit op-ed

Hungary's unofficial government newspaper Magyar Nemzet (Hungarian Nation) often floats issues that Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his government would like to gauge public opinion on without addressing those issues themselves. Last weekend, it happened again. On Sunday (August 15), the paper opened debate on an issue that had previously been deemed off-limits even in Hungarian government circles: Hungary's exit from the EU.

"It is time to talk about Huxit" was the title of the Magyar Nemzet opinion piece. The news went off like a bomb in Hungary — with most larger media outlets reporting, opposition politicians up in arms and pundits expressing concern. It was hardly surprising, for in spite of deep political divides, social and cross-party consensus held that the country's rightful place was in the European Union. Until now, that view had been one of the very few things most Hungarians could agree on.

Now, however, for the first time since Orban came to power in 2010, Hungary's exit from the EU is being openly broached by the government's most important news outlet. It is a situation without precedent.
The official English version reads: "[T]he time has come, now in July 2021, to seriously consider the possibility of our withdrawal from a union of states with a thousand bleeding wounds, showing imperial symptoms, and treating the eastern and central European countries incredibly arrogantly." The reason given: "Our paths have diverged as the West now consciously ( … ) breaks from Christian morality and values. Instead, they aim to build a cosmopolitan, faceless world society based on the unbridled self-enjoyment and self-destruction of the individual ( … ).
[By contrast,] we Hungarians, Poles and central and eastern European people hold on to our cultural and religious foundations."

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been stoking resentment against the EU for quite some time

Hungarian government circles notified in advance?
The op-ed was written by Tamas Fricz, a political scientist known for radical and often crude, extreme-right views. But Fricz is no political outsider. Rather, he is a leading member of several important Orban-affiliated organizations, including the Forum of Civic Alliance (COF), which periodically stages "peace marches" — demonstrations of power by the Orban government with tens or even hundreds of thousands of participants who lend their ears to speakers engaging in harsh anti-EU rhetoric.

But that is not the only indication that government circles had been informed about Fricz' op-ed in advance — or possibly even coordinated its thrust with him. Over the past couple of weeks, the Huxit issue has also been latched onto by various Hungarian politicians, if only implicitly.

Supporters of Viktor Orban's Fidesz party see less advantage to being in the EU now that they get less cash

The EU — an 'intellectual morgue'
Hungary's Speaker of Parliament Laszlo Kover — second only to the president in terms of protocol — said in an interview at the beginning of July that unlike the 2003 referendum on EU membership that took place a few months before the bloc's major eastern enlargement in May 2004, he would "definitely vote no" in a referendum on EU membership today.

At the end of July, Hungary's Justice Minister Judit Varga paraphrased a statement made by German Christian Social Union (CSU) politician Peter Gauweiler and printed in Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, saying the EU was "no longer a refuge but an intellectual morgue."

Finance Minister Mihaly Varga, in turn, said during an interview last week that he would vote "yes" in a referendum on EU membership. Still, he added, by the end of the current decade, at which point Hungary will have become a net contributor to the EU, people might see the issue differently.

Hungary's Speaker of Parliament Laszlo Kover voted to join the EU in 2003; now he wants out

'A life outside the EU'
Likewise, Viktor Orban himself has occasionally spoken of the issue, most recently in 2016 in connection with Brexit, saying "of course [there is] a life outside the EU." Orban has not yet contributed anything to the current Huxit debate. During the last couple of years, however, he has been embarking on an increasingly open and aggressive collision course with the EU — most recently with a law that bans so-called "homosexuality or sex reassignment propaganda for minors" that was harshly criticized by Brussels. On such occasions, Hungary's PM has been increasingly clear about his rejection of the EU in its current form.

Consequently, Hungary's opposition politicians presume Orban and his inner circle were the real instigators behind the Magyar Nemzet op-ed. "Orban's campaign for the exit of our home country out of the EU has begun," wrote Left-Green politician Timea Szabo of the Dialogue for Hungary party (Parbeszed Magyarorszagert) on Facebook. "From now on, those who vote for Orban vote for the end of our EU membership." Similar statements were made by politicians from virtually all other opposition parties.

Orban opponents with Hungarian and European flags at a demonstration in December 2019

Blackmail potential vis-a-vis Brussels
"Are we now, in a display of insurgent defiance, shutting the door on which we used to knock in order to be given permission to enter?" asked conservative writer Balint Ablonczy, who concluded: "From now on, there can hardly be a more important issue in Hungarian politics."

Budapest-based political scientist Peter Kreko told DW that an exit from the EU was not yet in Orban's interest. "He is, however, interested in turning public opinion against the EU in order to potentially blackmail Brussels with the threat of a possible Huxit. In this regard, his aim is to aggravate hostility towards the EU in Hungary."

Political scientist Peter Kreko is the director of Political Capital Policy Research, a Budapest think tank

Hungary's ultimate division
One of his tools is the allegation that Hungary is receiving increasingly less money from the EU. That suggests the country is therefore unable to gain any more advantage from EU
membership, added Kreko, who is currently a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. According to opinion polls, Hungarians regarded EU funding as one of the key advantages of EU membership.

"Nevertheless it should be pointed out that the vast majority of Hungarians have, in principle, a very firm pro-European attitude," Kreko said. "Even a decade of ever-increasing EU skepticism and increasingly vulgar anti-EU propaganda issued by the Orban government has not been able to change that."

Given that parliamentary elections are scheduled next spring, it could, therefore, "be a tactical error to exaggerate anti-EU propaganda," said Kreko, as this could drive undecided voters with a pro-European attitude into the arms of the opposition.

The assorted reactions to the Magyar Nemzet op-ed make one thing evident: With an open Huxit debate, Hungarian leader Viktor Orban may just divide his country once and for all.

 

[Plain Jane]

Another weekend of protests against France’s ‘health pass’ restrictions

Thousands of people demonstrated in the streets of France again on Saturday against the government's Covid-19 vaccination policies amid concern from rights groups about anti-Semitic sentiment in the…

www.france24.com

Another weekend of protests against France’s ‘health pass’ restrictions
Issued on: 21/08/2021 - 17:18

Protesters march during a national day of protest against the Covid-19 health pass, Paris, August 21, 2021. © Stéphane de Sakutin, AFP
Text by:FRANCE 24Follow
5 min
Thousands of people demonstrated in the streets of France again on Saturday against the government's Covid-19 vaccination policies amid concern from rights groups about anti-Semitic sentiment in the protest movement.


Saturday's protests were called for the sixth weekend in a row to denounce a new "health pass" system announced by President Emmanuel Macron that they see as unfairly restricting the rights of the unvaccinated.

The Ministry of the Interior put the number of people turning out at around 175,000 at 220 demonstrations nationwide, including 14,700 in Paris, as of 1900 GMT.

Under the system, introduced progressively since mid-July, anyone wishing to enter a restaurant, theatre, cinema, long-distance train, or large shopping centre must show proof of vaccination or a negative test.

Around 200 different demonstrations were called across the country, with around 9,500 people counted in southern Montpellier, 4,000 in eastern Strasbourg and 3,400 in Bordeaux, according to local authorities.

At the head of the Paris march in the early afternoon, a few hundred people held up flags and banners with the word "Liberty" on them while shouting "Macron! We don't want your pass!"
The protest movement has brought together conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, former members of the "Yellow Vest" anti-government movement, as well as people concerned that the system unfairly creates a two-tier society.

Around 200,000 people have marched on previous weekends, according to interior ministry figures, and final tallies for Saturday's demonstrations are set to be released in the evening.
Organisers claim the real number on previous weekends was double the figures estimated by police.

Far-right leader Florian Philippot, who has accused Macron of turning France into a dictatorship and likened the health pass to apartheid, was at the Paris rally on Saturday.

The government insists the pass is necessary to encourage vaccination uptake and avoid a fourth national lockdown, with the unvaccinated making up eight or nine out of every 10 Covid-19 patients admitted to hospital.

Anti-Semitism worry
The anti-health pass movement has been marked from the beginning by slogans and symbols that have been denounced by Jewish groups and anti-racism campaigners.
Some protesters have worn yellow stars similar to the ones that the Nazi regime forced Jews to display during World War II, leading to condemnation from Holocaust survivors for the offensive comparison.
Others have been photographed holding up signs with the word "Qui?" (meaning "Who?"), a coded reference to Jews who are accused of spreading Covid propaganda through the media and profiting from vaccination campaigns.

"What I find striking is how it (anti-Semitism) is recurrent and openly displayed," the head of SOS Racisme, Dominique Sopo, told AFP.

"During the Yellow Vest movement it was something expressed on the margins... now the people carrying these signs are not hiding and other protesters are not reacting."

Left-wing newspaper Le Monde condemned the rise in anti-Semitic behaviour in an editorial this week, calling it a "poison for society, a danger for all of us."

"Although anti-Semitism on the far-right is old, it seems to be encouraged at the moment by the rise in conspiracy thinking," it added.

Tristan Mendes-France, a specialist on the conspiracy movement, called Covid-19 "an accelerator of anti-Semitism because we are seeing a tragedy unfold continuously.
"People who have fallen into the conspiracy theory movement online are reminded daily about their anger and their frustration because we're always talking about the epidemic. It's like rubbing salt in an open wound."

Overseas crisis
Though disputed, the health pass system has been effective in encouraging people to sign up for vaccinations, with millions of people booking appointments in the days after it was announced on July 12.

Around 47 million people have received at least one dose, about 70 percent of the population, which is a higher rate than in Germany and Italy and only slightly behind Britain.

The most severe Covid-19 hotpots are found in France's overseas territories such as the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, as well as the Pacific islands of French Polynesia where the more infectious Delta variant has ripped through.

Polynesian authorities announced on Saturday that schools, restaurants and bars would close for two weeks, while a nightly curfew will be brought forward by an hour to 8 pm.

Tourists have been told to stay in their hotels on the islands where the number of infections has increased by a multiple of 14 in two weeks, according to the head of the islands, Edouard Fritch.

France reported around 22,000 new infections in the past 24 hours, health ministry figures on Saturday show.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

 

[Plain Jane]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

BY TYLER DURDEN
MONDAY, AUG 23, 2021 - 02:00 AM
Authored by Lorenz Duschamps via The Epoch Times,
Greece has completed the construction of a 25-mile (40-km) long steel wall and a new surveillance system along the border with Turkey amid concerns about a possible surge of illegal immigrants trying to reach Europe following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan this month.




“Our borders remain secure and inviolable. The new boundary wall has been completed and is actively guarded,” Greece’s Citizens’ Protection Minister Michalis Chrisochoidis told reporters during a press briefing while visiting the site in the region of Evros on Friday.

“We cannot wait passively to see the impact of the Afghan crisis,” he added.
“The high-tech, automated monitoring system is active. Possible refugee flows from Afghanistan will be stopped.”

About 8 miles of the steel wall has been there for some time along the Evros river, and with the latest extension, the wall is now 25 miles long and 19.7 feet (6 meters) high.

A policeman patrols alongside a steel border wall at Evros river, near the village of Poros, at the Greek-Turkish border on May 21, 2021. (Giannis Papanikos/AP Photo)

Greece began bolstering its border defense in recent months and authorities at the border have been warned about a possible new wave of illegal immigrants, likely coming from Afghanistan after the Taliban’s sweeping advance this month, sparking fears in Europe about a new migration crisis.

The recent events and the seizure of power by Taliban insurgents in the war-torn nation have fuelled the European Union to resist a possible repeat of the 2015 refugee crisis when nearly 1 million people fleeing the Middle East and beyond crossed into Greece from Turkey before traveling north to wealthier states.


A police car patrols alongside a steel wall at Evros river, near the village of Poros, at the Greek-Turkish border, Greece, on May 21, 2021. (Giannis Papanikos/AP Photo)

Greece is insisting it will not allow a repetition of the 2015 crisis. Border forces are warned to make sure the country does not become Europe’s gateway again.

Neighboring Turkey has also expressed concerns over a potential wave of illegal immigrants coming from Afghanistan.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on nations in Europe on Thursday to shoulder the responsibility for people fleeing Taliban forces, warning that Turkey will not become Europe’s “refugee warehouse.”


Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan listens during the opening session of the virtual global Leaders Summit on Climate, as he sits in his office in Ankara, Turkey, on April 22, 2021. (Mustafa Kamaci/Turkish Presidency via AP)

“We need to remind our European friends of this fact: Europe—which has become the center of attraction for millions of people—cannot stay out of [the refugee] problem by harshly sealing its borders to protect the safety and wellbeing of its citizens,” Erdogan said.
“Turkey has no duty, responsibility, or obligation to be Europe’s refugee warehouse,” he added.

The latest issue on immigration that is possibly going to impact both nations will become “a serious challenge for everyone,” Erdogan told Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in a telephone conversation on Friday. Erdogan said it has also begun reinforcing its border with Iran.

The government in Greece said last week they are not going to allow illegal immigrants seeking asylum to cross into Europe and will turn refugees back.
11,54799