Category: Europe

German PEGIDA cancels rally over death threats

German PEGIDA movement, which stands against ‘the Islamization of the West’ has canceled next week’s rally in the city of Dresden after threats were issued against one of its top organizers.

The Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) movement has been holding protests every Monday in the eastern German city of Dresden since October.

The rallies, which initially gathered no more than 500 people, hit a record attendance of 25,000 last week.

PEGIDA announced on its Facebook page that the rally planned for January 19 has been called off after the police said “there is a specific threat against a member of the organization team.”

According to DPA news agency, the threats were filed by Islamic radicals against the movement’s co-leader, Lutz Bachmann.

The German police were informed of the threats against Bachman by foreign secret services, the agency added.

A spokesman for the Dresden police said that they had placed a “general ban” on all public gatherings on Monday, Reuters reported.

“The police in Dresden have received information of a concrete threat against the weekly PEGIDA rally,” a statement by Dresden police said. “Assassins have been called up to mingle among the PEGIDA protestors and murder one of the individuals leading the rally.”

Instead of taking to the streets, PEGIDA called on all Europeans who oppose “religious bigotry any kind” to hang the national flag of their country out of their windows and light a candle on Monday.

PEGIDA is currently the most supported anti-immigration movement in Germany as rallies by similar organizations in other cities have so far been unable to draw anywhere near as much people.

The Dresden group was criticized by many German politicians, with Chancellor Angela Merkel calling PEGIDA “racists full of hatred.”

School slammed for labeling toddlers ‘racist’

Professionals have slammed teachers who have been reporting children as young as five for being racist, saying that making children frightened to ask questions is unhealthy.

The comments come after parent Hayley White was summoned to her seven-year-old son’s primary school and told that her some Elliott had been at the centre of an ‘incident’ with another pupil, the Daily Mail reports.

She was told that the situation was so serious she would have to sign an official form admitting he was racist; something Ms White refused to do.

The reason for this demand was because her son had asked a four-year-old pupil during break time if he was “brown because he was from Africa”.

“When I arrived at the school and asked Elliott what had happened, he became extremely upset,” said Ms White, a 32-year-old NHS worker.

She said her son was distressed about the reaction from staff, saying to his mother: “I was just asking a question. I didn’t mean it to be nasty”.

The row over the question escalated when the black child told his mother about the question when he returned home from school, who then informed the school hoping they could “have a quiet word with Elliott”.

Elliott’s mother was given a copy of the school rules to read with particular focus on its ‘zero-tolerance’ policy on racism.

“I was told I would have to sign a form acknowledging my son had made a racist remark, which would be submitted to the local education authority for further investigation,” she said.

“I refused to sign it, and I told the teacher that in no way did I agree the comment was racist. My son is inquisitive. He always likes to ask questions, but that doesn’t make him a racist.”

The singling out of children as ‘racist’ or ‘prejudiced’ for making comments which the politically-correct brigade rule as unacceptable can have serious consequences for young children, with the record staying on their school report and the child being branded as a bigot for the whole of their school career for asking a simple question.

Source: Breitbart

Soviet-style reactors struggling with US nuclear fuel

Ukrainian energy sector workers are facing technical problems with American nuclear fuel loading into the Soviet-type reactors

China is ready to sell fuel for nuclear power plants in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, a China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) source told TASS on Friday on the sidelines of the World Nuclear Spotlight forum.

According to the source, Chinese companies intend to sell the fuel to the countries that operate various types of Soviet-and Russian-made NPPs. Aside from Ukraine, China is viewing the possibility of exporting nuclear fuel to Hungary and Romania.

The source said Ukrainian energy sector workers are facing technical problems with American nuclear fuel loading into the Soviet-type reactors.

At the moment China is actively buying uranium mines with a view to exporting uranium to other countries in the foreseeable future.

Asked about Russia’s possible claims to the Chinese manufacturers of nuclear fuel, he said that “there are no special restrictions.” “Despite the related agreements, the Russian side is unlikely to stop the supplies,” said the CNNC representative.

Russia and China have been actively developing co-operation in the nuclear sphere for many years. For example, State Atomic Energy Corporation Rosatom and CNNC signed a protocol to launch the discussion of possible formats of co-operation in the sphere of construction of nuclear power plants in third countries.

Russia cuts off gas to six European countries

Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian state energy giant Gazprom to cut supplies to and through Ukraine amid accusations, according to The Daily Mail, that its neighbor has been siphoning off and stealing Russian gas.

Due to these “transit risks for European consumers in the territory of Ukraine,” Gazprom cut gas exports to Europe by 60%.

The EU raged that the sudden cut-off to some of its member countries was “completely unacceptable,” but Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller later added that Russia plans to shift all its natural gas flows crossing Ukraine to a route via Turkey; and Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak stated unequivocally, “the decision has been made.”

Russia’s decision plunged the continent into an energy crisis ‘within hours’ as a dispute with Ukraine escalated.

Six countries reported a complete shut-off of Russian gas shipped via Ukraine today, in a sharp escalation of a struggle over energy that threatens Europe as winter sets in.

Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Romania, Croatia and Turkey all reported a halt in gas shipments from Russia through Ukraine.

Source: Zerohedge

Switzerland stuns markets by giving up on currency peg

Bowing to the inevitable, Switzerland has ditched an increasingly expensive policy to limit the export-sapping rise of the Swiss franc — a decision that propelled the currency a whopping 30 percent higher against the euro within minutes.

Thursday’s decision by the Swiss National Bank, or SNB, to end its efforts to keep the euro from trading below 1.20 francs came amid mounting speculation that the European Central Bank will next week back a big stimulus program that will put more euros in circulation, which would further dilute their value.

That expectation has seen the euro face intense selling pressure in currency markets, particularly against the dollar. The euro has fallen to nine-year lows against the dollar and below its launch rate in 1999.

As the outlook for the euro has darkened, the cost for the Swiss central bank of defending the peg by buying euros or selling francs has risen. Though the timing of the Swiss decision proved a surprise, most foreign exchange experts thought the peg would have to be abandoned, just as previous such efforts had.

“Switzerland suddenly got a whole lot more expensive,” said Michael Hewson, senior market analyst at CMC Markets.

Many analysts thought the decision was inevitable in light of next week’s expected announcement by the ECB to break new ground in its efforts to inject life into the ailing 19-country eurozone economy. Its stimulus package is expected to be worth as much as 1 trillion euros ($1.17 trillion).

The peg, which was introduced in Sept. 2011, was an attempt to halt the rise of the franc — a traditional haven currency for investors — against the euro at a time when the eurozone debt crisis was at its height. The strong franc was then particularly problematic for Swiss exporters, who were forced to drastically cut prices to remain competitive.

Unsurprisingly, Thursday’s move prompted a painful 11 percent drop in Switzerland’s stock market as investors took fright at the worsening outlook for Switzerland’s traditional exporters, such as those selling chocolate or ski holidays.

Source: AP

Record 3 million copies of Charlie Hebdo on newsstands

A record 3 million copies of the new edition of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo have appeared on French newsstands, with new caricatures triggering outrage among Muslims all over the world, and threats from radical Islamists.

Many mainstream Muslim organizations also reacted by saying that the mere depiction of the prophet is a sacrilege: Egypt’s Islamic body Dar al-Ifta branded the publication “an unjustified provocation against the feelings of 1.5 billion Muslims,” AFP reported.

“This edition will result in a new wave of hatred in French and Western society. What the magazine is doing does not serve coexistence and the cultural dialogue Muslims aspire to,” Dar al-Ifta said in a statement.

Sunni Islam’s most renowned center of learning, Al-Azhar in Cairo, said that the cartoons “stir up hatred” and “do not serve the peaceful coexistence between peoples.”

Tabnak, a conservative online outlet in Iran, wrote that “Charlie Hebdo has again insulted the Prophet.”

French Muslim leaders have urged members of the Muslim community to remain calm.

Three million copies – compared to the usual 60,000 a week – have been printed. The first batches have sold out within minutes, with thousands lining up to buy the magazine at newsstands.

Charlie Hebdo will print 5 million copies of its latest edition to meet high demand, distributors said.

Charlie Hebdo’s front cover Wednesday shows the Prophet Muhammad shedding a tear while holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign. The headline reads: “Tout est pardonné” (All is forgiven).

Thousand of German spies at risk after leak

Thousands of German spies at risk after double-agent stole list of identities

Thousands of German spies posted around the world could be at risk after it emerged that a double agent unmasked last summer stole a list of their real identities and may have sold it.

The double agent, who has been identified only as Markus R under strict German privacy laws, obtained a top secret list of the real names, aliases and locations of 3,500 German intelligence officers posted abroad, according to a report in Bild newspaper.

But German intelligence sources sought to downplay the incident, briefing that the list in question was out of date and contained far fewer than 3,500 names, the DPA news agency reported.

The arrest of Markus R last summer caused a major diplomatic rift between Germany and the US, after it emerged he had acted as a double agent for the CIA.

He had also approached Russian intelligence and offered to sell them secret information, and there are fears he may have passed the list of German spies’ names to a hostile foreign agency.

It was reported earlier this week that prosecutors now believe the case of Markus R is more serious than previously thought.

He was discovered after an email he sent the Russian Embassy in Berlin offering to sell secrets in exchange for cash was intercepted, and German investigators were stunned when he confessed he had been spying for the Americans.

Prosecutors now believe he was recruited by the CIA a year and a half earlier than he has admitted, in 2010, and was paid €75,000 for passing secrets over a period of four years, according to Spiegel magazine.

Source: The Telegraph

Russian blames Western-backed funding for Paris attack

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday that last Wednesday’s attack on a French satirical magazine was committed by militants who had fought in Syria for the West-backed aim of ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power.

“Cooperation [with the West on counter-terrorism] has been suspended. Meanwhile, terrorists do not suspend cooperation with each other. Terrorist activity knows no bounds,” Lavrov said. “The two brothers who attacked the editorial office of the Paris magazine had mastered ‘the art of terror’ in Syria, fighting with those who had been trying to oust Bashar al-Assad – an aim supported by our Western counterparts,” he added.

Seventeen people were killed in the French capital and its neighbourhoods in the terrorist attacks last week. Among them were ten journalists from the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, three policemen and four visitors of a kosher grocery store.

A video of supposedly Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered the five people, has emerged online. He swears his allegiance to the Islamic State in the clip and attempts to justify the wave of terror attacks.

The man much resembling Coulibaly talks of being a “soldier of the Caliphate” and states that he coordinated his plans with the brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, who perpetrated a bloody massacre at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday.

The man asserted that ‘France is a legitimate target.’ He is referred to as Aboü Bassir AbdAllah al-Ifriqip and wears military body armor, displays an array of weapons and does push-ups.

He pledges his allegiance to “Caliph Ibrahim”, also known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed leader of the Islamic State and speaks about the attack on the policewoman in the past tense, suggesting the attack had already been completed.

In the background of the video, radio news is already documenting the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices.

All the jihadists belonged to the same terrorist cell, according to French police. The man in the video discusses how they coordinated with one another.

Police commissioner working on Charlie Hebdo shootings found dead

A police commissioner, who had been investigating the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine committed suicide with his service gun on Thursday night, French media reported.

Police commissioner Helric Fredou, who had been investigating the attack on the French weekly satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, was found dead in his office.

The incident occurred in Limoges, the administrative capital of the Limousin region in west-central France, on Thursday night, local media France 3 reports.

Helric Fredou, 45, suffered from ‘depression’ and experienced ‘burn out’ according to the official statement. Shortly before committing suicide, he met with the family of a victim of the Charlie Hebdo attack and killed himself just before completing the report.

Fredou began his career in 1997 as a police officer at the regional office of the judicial police of Versailles. Later he returned to Limoges, his hometown. Since 2012 he had been the deputy director of the regional police service.

Vilification of Germany’s PEGIDA

Actually it’s more than that. It has now come to falsification and censorship. Says Udo Ulfkotte, German maverick journalist and whistleblower

Is there a Nobel Prize for media falsification, lies and betrayal of readers? Judging by the way German mainstream media are covering PEGIDA there has to be one, argues Udo Ulfkotte in his latest piece for KOPP online, his publisher’s news website.

The tactics honed against Russia are now being put in place to defame PEGIDA – those Dresden conservatives who dare peacefully to protest uncontrolled immigration and Islamization, as well as the creation of parallel sharia tribunal in Germany, among other things.

PEGIDA also has a soft spot for Putin’s Russia, judging from some of the placards seen during their demos.

MDR is Germany’s first channel in the Eastern states of Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. On Jan 06 it asked its viewers „Do you think PEGIDA damages the city of Dresden?“.

Some 10,958 viewers took part in the snapshot survey.

Surprise surprise. Only 7% agreed with the preset answer: „Yes, because it casts the city in a false light“, while 92% of respondents chose: „No, why? At last somebody dares to speak the truth“.

Be it Iraq, Crimea or PEGIDA, ordinary Germans just will not think the way the media tell them to. Journalism (asking people what they think) and propaganda (telling them what to think) are increasingly hard to reconcile in the age of social media, as journalists found out during the Ukraine crisis.

What to do with these embarrassing survey result? What to do?

It could not be blamed on Russian propaganda. Nor on Kremlin trolls. So there seemed to be no way out… Germany’s first channel had apparently shot itself in the foot again.

Wait: what about a little censoring? After all, it is for a good cause, the MDR editors must have thought. So the snapshot survey quietly disappeared from their website, hoping nobody would notice. Except that lots of people did. And they resorted to protesting on Facebook.

The result: after apologizing to their angry viewers MDR put the survey back online. It seems some media hacks occasionally dislike what they see in the mirror.

The survey and its censoring having gone wrong, German media have now started to make unfounded claims against PEGIDA. Apparently it has been „infiltrated“ by Nazis.

As if Germans had not seen enough real Nazis, supported by the USA and the EU, doing real Nazi things, from burning people alive in Odessa to cluster bombing civilians in Donbass.

As if, ignored by Western media, a real Nazi parade had not been staged as recently as Jan 1 in Kiev!

But this time we don’t have to worry: PEGIDA alleged infiltration is being carefully monitored by never heard before „constitution protection groups“. After all, Nazism is illegal in Germany – unless it operates near Russian borders that is.

According to Ulfkotte, the message is clear: „dear citizen, don’t get involved with PEGIDA if you don’t want to be monitored by the constitution protectors“.

Sounds vaguely Orwellian, doesn’t it?

Finally, Ulfkotte proves the bias of German media with a recent example.

A God-hater whom the media called Moroccan badly damaged a Church in South Tirol, Italy’s only German-speaking province:

„Imagine if a Christian or an Atheist had damaged a mosque in a German-speaking region,” says Ulfkotte, “there would be candle-lit demonstrations all over the country, and you could not turn a television on without hearing about it.”

“But it was a Muslim who did it, and in the name of the Koran. What has happened then? You can see for yourself. Nothing”

“Next time a journalist assures you that Islamization is not taking place, please remember them that the Moroccan in question, who had damaged churches before, never spent a single day in jail for it. He was placed under house arrest instead”.

One needs not agree with Ulfkotte about the link between lenient treatment by the Italian judiciary and alleged Islamization. But the more general points he makes about German media are correct and have been vindicated time and time again.

MDR is part of ARD, a public network of public broadcasters known in Germany as “Das Erste” or the first channel.

When, in June 2014, ARD’s own advisory board released a report, defining ARD coverage of the Ukraine crisis as “inadequate, one-sided and biased”, news of the report took three months to begin circulating in the… wait for it… alternative media.

And it never did in the mainstream media.

Source: Daniele Pozzati

Arson attack on German newspaper

A Hamburg daily that reprinted satirical cartoons from French newspaper Charlie Hebdo was hit by arsonists at the weekend, raising security concerns in Germany on the eve of a planned mass rally against Islam in the city of Dresden.

Islamist militant attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher deli in Paris this week that killed 17 people have fuelled fears of similar assaults in other European countries and prompted a warning from German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere.

“I am very concerned about well-prepared perpetrators like those in Paris, Brussels, Australia or Canada,” he told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag. There were about 260 people in Germany regarded as dangerous Islamists, he said.

Bild am Sonntag said US intelligence agencies had tapped conversations of senior Islamic State (IS) members in which they said the Paris attacks were the start of a series in Europe.

In Hamburg, two people were arrested after an incendiary device was thrown into a building of the Hamburger Morgenpost daily, setting some documents on fire, police said.

Source: Reuters

Support for Geert Wilders doubles after Paris attack

Support for the anti-Islamic Freedom Party (PVV) of Dutch politician Geert Wilders has jumped to its highest level in more than a year after the Islamist militant attacks in Paris.

Wilders, known for his cool rhetoric, said after the Paris bloodshed that the West was “at war” with Islam, drawing a rebuke from Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Sunday.

If elections were held now, his party would be the single largest in the Netherlands, with 31 seats in the 150-member parliament, more than twice as many as it won in the last elections, according to a Sunday poll.

The governing Liberal and Labour parties, damaged by persistent sluggish growth, would have just 28 seats between them, compared to the 79 they held after the 2012 elections.

The Freedom Party was polling 30 seats just prior to the Jan. 7-9 Paris attacks, in which 17 people including journalists and policemen were killed by three Islamist gunmen who were later shot dead by French special forces.

Wilders this week called in an interview for measures against Islam: “If we don’t do anything, it will happen here,” he was quoted by the newspaper Het Parool as saying.

More than 80 percent of respondents to the De Hond poll said people who left the Netherlands to wage jihad (holy war) in Syria should lose their Dutch citizenship and those returning from fighting in Syria or Iraq should face lengthy jail terms.

The attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo had particular resonance in the Netherlands. In 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, known for making anti-Islam remarks that were designed to offend, was stabbed to death by an Islamic radical as he cycled down an Amsterdam street.

Wilders, who has described Islam as a “lie” and the prophet Muhammad as a “criminal”, has lived in hiding and under 24-hour armed guard since van Gogh’s murder.

He is currently facing prosecution over remarks he made at an election rally last year, when he appeared to call for “fewer Moroccans” in the city of The Hague, and later referred in a television interview to “Moroccan scum”.

Source: Reuters

Police kill three Charlie Hebdo suspects

Heavily armed SWAT teams moved into Porte de Vincennes after the hostage situation developed at a kosher grocery, involving a black gunman and at least one hostage, police said.

The Paris Public Prosecutor’s office confirmed the standoff had been connected to another hostage situation that had occurred at the same time outside Paris, where police shot dead two gunmen suspected in Wednesday’s Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Police told ABC News that a suspect in the Thursday fatal shooting of a police officer in Paris’ Monrouge area, identified as Amedi Coulibaly, 32, was believed to have been involved with the grocery standoff.

Police issued a wanted poster for both Coulibaly and another female suspect named Hayat Boumeddinene earlier in the killing of the policewoman. Police also gave more details about the attack, saying Coulibaly wore body armor when he allegedly killed the officer.

Coulibaly had met with Nicolas Sarkozy. He worked at a Coca-Cola plant in his hometown.

He and nine other people like him visited the President of the Republic in 2009, who wanted to meet companies engaged in favor of the employment of young blacks.

Sarkozy was not really very popular with black and Arab youths. But “the encounter in real life, it is impressive. Like it or not, it’s still the president,” Coulibaly said then.

The other hostage situation ended in the town of Dammartin-en-Goele outside of Paris. The two men, identified by police as Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, were holed up in a printing company in a town northeast of Paris, taking one male employee hostage, before they were shot dead by police.

Both had been on a US No Fly List ‘for years,’ a US official said. According to different revelations, one of the suspects trained with Al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen.

French-born sons of Algerian parents, they were both logged in the US government’s Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) system, a database on known or suspected international terrorists, US counterterrorism sources said on condition of anonymity. TIDE contains over one million names.

The casualty situation in Vincennes is still not clear. There have been reports of at least four hostages killed, but they have not been confirmed by French authorities. Other sources spoke of four “critically wounded”.

Multiculturalism and ISIS blamed for Charlie Hebdo shooting

The attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo was a result of Europe’s policy of multiculturalism, UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage said Thursday.

“The real question is this: We in Britain – and I’ve seen some evidence in other European countries of it too – have pursued a really rather gross policy of multiculturalism and by that, what I mean, is that we’ve encouraged people who have come from different cultures to remain within those cultures and not to integrate fully within our communities.” Farage said during the Leaders’ Debate program on LBC radio.

British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg accused Farage of using the incident to make political gains after the UKIP leader started speculating on the reasons behind the deadly attack on the magazine in France.

The head of Britain’s MI5 agency reportedly said that a group of core al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria is planning attacks, adding that intelligence services cannot hope to stop them all.

Militants in Syria were planning “mass casualty attacks” in the West, the head of Britain’s MI5 agency Andrew Parker said, adding that intelligence services may be powerless to stop them, AFP reported.

“We know… that a group of core al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria is planning mass casualty attacks against the West,” agency’s head was quoted as saying to journalists on Thursday.

Earlier the head of the agency spoke about the threat from extremists amid terrorist attack on the headquarters of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. “It is too early for us to come to judgements about the precise details or origin of the attack but it is a terrible reminder of the intentions of those who wish us harm,” he said in his Thursday speech in London.

He estimated that “600 extremists are among the many Britons who have travelled there (to Syria). A significant proportion has joined ISIL (IS),” and called the threat “ongoing and increasing,” CBS News cited.