Category: Europe

Ground Zero for migrants errupts in chaos

Keleti train station in Budapest, which has emerged as ground zero in Europe’s spiraling migration crisis, temporarily shut down its services on Tuesday under the strain of an influx of migrants trying to travel to Germany from Hungary.

Emphasizing the sense of confusion across Europe, Austria’s interior minister, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, called on Germany, the preferred destination for many of the migrants, to clarify its stance on asylum rules.

Rows of riot police officers wearing red caps tried to contain the migrants in Budapest, and the migrants erupted in protest after the station stopped allowing them to board trains. Instead, they were allowed into the courtyard of the station, which has been transformed into a makeshift camp.

The migrants, who had been gathered since 5 a.m. in the hopes of boarding a train, chanted: “Go free! Go free! Go free!” Later, they shouted, “Merkel, Merkel,” referring to Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, whose country is expected to receive 800,000 asylum seekers this year.

Train services at Keleti were restored shortly after 10 a.m., and no migrants were being allowed back into the station.

The scenes of confusion and despair at Keleti underlined the challenges facing Europe as tens of thousands of migrants, buffeted by civil war and conflict in the Middle East and Syria, are trying to make the perilous journey to Europe, only to be confronted with a patchwork of policies across a 28-member bloc that is ill equipped to deal with the surge.

In the last five days, the number of migrants trying to leave from the Budapest station has grown to 2,000 a day from about 800.

The chaotic scenes at the station came as Austria asked Germany to provide guidance about how to handle asylum seekers.

The cold reception migrants received in Budapest was a marked contrast to the one in Munich, where the police said on Tuesday that about 2,500 people had arrived on trains from Budapest, via Vienna, in the span of 24 hours. Hundreds more continued to arrive early Tuesday.

Streets around the city’s central train station were blocked off to allow the authorities to organize the migrants and bring them to the city’s refugee processing centers, where they were to be registered and begin the process of applying for asylum.

Matching the flood of people was a flow of donations of drinks, food and baby necessities from Munich residents. “There is no end to the willingness of people to help — Great!” the police said on Twitter.

In Hungary, the center-right government, under pressure from a far-right anti-immigrant party with a sizable voice in Parliament, has itself aired some of the most strident anti-immigrant speech on the Continent.

Source: NYT

Czech army should defend borders against migrants

The Czech Republic should defend its borders, using the army to expel “illegal immigrants” because the European Union isn’t curbing the influx of refugees into the bloc, President Milos Zeman said.

Zeman’s comments echoed those of other politicians calling for the EU to take action to stem the flood of people into the region from Syria and other conflict areas as they travel through Greece and the Balkan states to western Europe.

“Of course I would wish for the EU to strengthen its borders, but I don’t see any real action,” Zeman told reporters in Prague castle on Monday. “Therefore I believe the Czech Republic should take of its borders alone and expel illegal immigrants from the borders, including with the use of the army.”

The refugee crisis has escalated in central Europe this month, with Austrian police finding a Hungarian-licensed truck containing the bodies of 71 migrants last week. Scores more drowned when their boats capsized off the coast of Libya. Most refugees traveling to the EU pass through former communist countries as they head to Germany and other richer states.

Source: Bloomberg

Showers at Auschwitz shock Israelis

Israelis who visited the Auschwitz concentration camp museum in Poland on Sunday were shocked to discover that the museums’ management had placed mist showers near the facilities entrance, in an effort to beat the heat. Anyone who saw the showers could not help get past the gas chamber connotation.

“As soon as I got off the bus I walked into the shower contraption,” said Meyer Bolka, an Israeli visiting the museum. “I was in shock. It was a punch to the gut. I walked up to the reception and asked the worker there about the showers, she said it was a hot day. I told her: ‘With all due respect it reminds me of the gas chambers,’ she told me she is very sorry.”

According to Bolka, Israeli youths who were visiting the museum used the mist showers to cool down, but the placement of the contraptions raised anger among the older visitors. “I think that in a place like this they should have thought about the type of connotation this would raise,” he added. “If you want to cool the people down, you need to find another solution. It was not a pleasant sight to see those sprinklers.”

The Auschwitz museum management responded saying that there was no intention to hurt the feelings of the visitors, but rather to make their visit more pleasant on one of the hottest days of the year. The Museum will assess the continued placement going forward.

Source: ynetnews.com

Social media storm after German minister says ‘negro’

A German state minister sparked a social media storm on Tuesday after calling a beloved German pop singer a “wonderful Negro” during a TV debate on Europe’s migrant crisis.

The Twitter hashtag #Neger (Negro) topped trending topics in Germany the morning after Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann used the term for Roberto Blanco, who is of Afro-Cuban origin.

“Roberto Blanco was always a wonderful Negro, who most Germans thought was wonderful,” Herrmann had said in a TV talk show Monday evening on public broadcaster ZDF.

Continuing on the topic of immigrant “success stories” in Germany, he added that football powerhouse Bayern Munich also has many star players “with black skin”.

The debate centred on Blanco — a household name whose career as a singer peaked in the late 1960s and early 70s — comes as Europe faces its biggest migrant influx since World War II, with Germany the top destination.

On social media, people poured outrage and scorn on the comment from the minister of the conservative southern state of Bavaria.

Twitter user @Herzistvoll wrote: “A ‘Negro’ is only wonderful when he amuses white people with singing, dancing and football”.

User @TheGoodOldGamer commented that Herrmann “also has nothing against #Negroes who do the housework and work in the fields”.

Another Twitter user wrote that “whether Joachim Herrmann also finds #Obama wonderful remains unclear”.

An online comment from Berlin daily Tagesspiegel sneered that “little Joachim would like to be picked up from the 1950s”.

Herrmann on Monday morning was back on the airwaves to justify his comment, saying he had replied to a caller who had first used the term by saying he “did not want to have Negroes at all”.

The minister said this comment was “completely unacceptable”, adding that “I usually don’t use the word Negro at all”.

Source: AFP

Former adviser of British PM in full panic mode

A former adviser to Gordon Brown is in full-blown panic mode over China’s Black Monday, and has urged people to stock up on canned goods and bottled water as stock markets around the world slide.

Damian McBride appeared to suggest that the stock market dip could lead to civil disorder or other situations where it would be unreasonable for someone to leave the house.

“Advice on the looming crash, No.1: get hard cash in a safe place now; don’t assume banks & cashpoints will be open, or bank cards will work,” he tweeted.

“Crash advice No.2: do you have enough bottled water, tinned goods & other essentials at home to live a month indoors? If not, get shopping.

“Crash advice No.3: agree a rally point with your loved ones in case transport and communication gets cut off; somewhere you can all head to.”

French forces brace for civil unrest

French security forces are bracing for the eventuality of civil unrest.

The army has made contingency plans for the “reappropriation of national territory”, meaning to win back control of neighbourhoods where the population become hostile to the security forces and where guns are easily obtainable, according to the source.

“There are a lot of alienated and angry fourth-generation immigrant kids in the suburbs and the prospect of radicalisation is increasingly likely,” the source said.

“The idea that attacks like the one on the train are carried out by individuals acting on their own is not credible. We’re dealing with highly-organised networks of militant Islamists embarked on a campaign of violence and determined to intensify it.”

Kalashnikov automatic rifles — used by the train gunman and Islamist terrorists who killed 17 people in Paris in January — and anti-tank missiles are now obtainable in France.

Many were smuggled in from the former Yugoslavia after the Balkan wars in the 1990s. More weapons have come in from Libya, the sources said, adding that organised crime and terrorist groups were working together to procure them.

Fears of a possible missile strike on a passenger airliner or a September 11-style attack, according to sources close to French intelligence, are also mentioned.

“Airlines have been warned of a possible attack on a plane with an anti-tank missile,” a source told The Telegraph. “But pilots are unsure how to take evasive action.”

After Friday’s thwarted attempt to massacre passengers on an Amsterdam-Paris train and a series of terrorist attacks and attempted killings in France this year, President François Hollande warned the nation to prepare for more violence, considered inevitable as the Islamist threat grows.

Source: The Telegraph

Merkel booed at refugee centre

Angela Merkel has vowed “no tolerance” for violent anti-migrant protests that have gripped Germany in recent weeks.

The German chancellor called on her countrymen to make a stand against the “shameful and disgusting” protests on Wednesday, as she visited a migrant shelter that has been the scene of some of the worst violence.

“There is no tolerance for those people who question the dignity of others, there is no tolerance for those who are not willing to help where legal and human help is required,” Mrs Merkel said.

“The more people who make this clear, the stronger we shall be.”

But Mrs Merkel was booed and denounced as a “traitor” by rightwing protesters as she visited the government migrant shelter in the small town of Heidenau, outside Dresden.

More than 30 police officers were injured in three nights of running battles with protesters trying to stop asylum-seekers from entering the shelter over the weekend.

“Germany will help where help is needed. This will require still more strength,” Mrs Merkel said.

“We cannot operate as if we were in a normal situation. We shall succeed only if we break new ground together.”

Germany takes in by far the most asylum-seekers of any EU state, and expects to host 800,000 this year.

The country recently stopped deporting Syrian refugees under EU rules that require them to claim asylum in the first country they reach, and started accepting their claims itself.

But the record numbers have seen an outbreak of violent protests from the far-Right, and Mrs Merkel has been under increasing pressure to take a stand on the issue.

Meanwhile British premier David Cameron has called migrants “swarms of people” linked to organised crime in an interview with ITV.

Source: The Telegraph/ITV

Italy saves 3000 migrants

Italy’s coastguard on Saturday successfully coordinated the rescue of around 3000 migrants in the Mediterranean after receiving distress calls from more than 20 overcrowded vessels drifting in waters off Libya.

One of the biggest single-day rescue operations to date appeared to have been concluded without any reports of casualties.

Two navy ships, the Cigala Fulgosi and the Vega, picked up, respectively, 507 and 432 migrants from two wooden boats in danger of sinking just off Libya, the navy said.

The coastguard said its patrol boats had boarded a total of just under 1,000 people from various unseaworthy fishing boats and inflatables that had left Libya overnight Friday-Saturday.

At least another 1,000 rescued migrants and refugees were reported to be headed for Italian ports on other boats as the wave of new arrivals triggered increasingly virulent attacks on centre-left Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s handling of the migration crisis.

“This must a joke. We are using our own forces to do the people smugglers’ business for them and ensure we are invaded,” said Maurizio Gasparri, a senator for Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia party.

“Help them, rescue them and take care of them: but don’t let them land here,” the populist leader of the anti-immigration Northern League wrote on his Facebook page.

The rescued migrants included a batch of 311, including a new-born baby, who were on a boat belonging to humanitarian group Doctors without Borders (MSF) which is expected to dock on Monday in Vibo Valentia in Calabria, according to port authorities there.

A further 370 had been picked up by the Italian customs police and were headed for Messina in Sicily and the Norwegian boat Siem Pilot was also carrying hundreds of people to port.

Just over 170,000 migrants and refugees from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia landed at Italy’s southern ports in 2014 after being rescued in the Mediterranean, while the total for 2015 has already topped 104,000.

A further 135,000-plus have landed in Greece since January and more than 2,300 people have died at sea while trying to make it to Europe with the help of traffickers.

Source: AFP

Migrant flood breaks new record in June

A record 107,500 migrants crossed the European Union’s borders last month, according to new figures, showing they are arriving in dramatically increasing numbers and creating a humanitarian crisis for the 28-nation bloc.

EU border agency Frontex reported that its latest figures far outstripped the previous monthly record in June of 70,000.

During the first seven months of the year, there were nearly 340,000 migrants, up from 123,500 during the same period last year, Frontex said.

“This is an emergency situation for Europe that requires all EU member states to step in to support the national authorities who are taking on a massive number of migrants at its borders,” Frontex director Fabrice Leggeri said in a statement.

Germany alone expects as many as 750,000 refugees to seek asylum there this year, according to media reports.

The UN refugee agency said in the last week alone, 20,843 migrants — virtually all of them fleeing war and persecution in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq — arrived in Greece, which has seen around 160,000 migrants land on its shores since January, according to the UN refugee agency.

Germany, as Europe’s economic powerhouse, has become the refugees’ top destination, with one in three who arrived in the EU last year seeking asylum there.

According to a report in the Handelsblatt newspaper, Berlin expects up to three-quarters of a million to apply for asylum in 2015.

UN refugee chief Antonio Guterres called Tuesday for more solidarity among European countries in taking in asylum seekers, insisting it was “unsustainable” for Germany, along with Sweden, to take in the majority of refugees.

France and Britain meanwhile were preparing to sign a deal this week to try to alleviate the migrant crisis in the northern French port of Calais, where thousands of people desperate to get to Britain through the Channel tunnel have gathered.

There is no sign the flood of migrants into Europe will subside.

Some 250,000 migrants have already crossed the Mediterranean this year to Italy and Greece, and the International Organization for Migration said Tuesday it expected that number to pass 300,000 by the end of the year.

The ones who make it to shore are the lucky ones, with 2,440 people having died trying so far this year, according to the UNHCR.

The vast majority of migrants will travel on towards northern Europe.

German journalist wades into mass immigration debate

A German journalist suggested that prosecuting “Facebook rabble-rousers” – that is people who do not agree with mass immigration – while a step in the right direction, was not enough.

Reschke delivered her message just hours after Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the intelligence service, branded a right wing group “dangerous rabble-rousers”.

“These haters have to understand that society will not tolerate this,” she said. “So, if you are not of the opinion that all refugees are freeloaders who should be hunted down, burned or gassed, then you should make it very clearly known. Speak up against it.”

Anja Reschke ended by calling for a public demonstration in favor of “decency,” and told viewers that she was looking forward to “your comments on this commentary.”

She was not disappointed, as more than five million people watched a video of her remarks posted on Facebook in the first 48 hours after the broadcast, generating thousands of comments, both for and against, and more than 130,000 likes.

On Twitter, as The Guardian’s Berlin correspondent, Kate Connolly, reported, the replies to Ms. Reschke included outrage from a German-speaker who claimed to be living in England and wrote that it was “Better to be a Nazi in the street than a foreign social parasite.”

The same blogger later complained that Germany granted freedom of speech only to those who agreed with the mainstream consensus, branding dissidents as Nazis.

Most German journalists however backed Reschke.

Source: NYT/The Independent

Report suggests Russia and NATO are preparing for war

Russia and NATO are actively preparing for war with one another amid the greatest build up of military tension in Europe since the end of the Cold War, a new report says.

Rival exercises by the Russian armed forces and Nato have led to several near-miss incidents that could result in confrontation between the two sides, and leaders need to consider a new arms control treaty to avert the possibility of heightened tensions spilling into war.

The report by the European Leadership Network, a think tank, comes amid the most intense fighting for six months in eastern Ukraine and as Michael Fallon, the defence minister, pledged to expand a British army training mission to Ukraine.

“We do not suggest that the leadership of either side has made a decision to go to war or that a military conflict between the two is inevitable, but that the changed profile of exercises is a fact and it does play a role in sustaining the current climate of tensions in Europe,” the authors write.

The report outlines how both Nato and Russia have primed their forces to respond to an escalation since the Ukraine crisis erupted in early 2014.

The preparations include major military exercises by both Russia and Nato that appear designed exclusively to respond to one another’s capabilities and potential war plans.

”Whilst spokespeople may maintain that these operations are targeted against only hypothetical opponents, the nature and scale of the operations indicate otherwise,” the report writers say.

In March 2015, Russian conducted “snap exercises” that saw 80,000 troops engaged in long-range deployments and simulate combat on a scale that made the United States or Nato the only possibly adversary.

Nato’s exercise “Allied Shield,” in June this year, saw 15,000 allied troops engaged in a series of mock operations including response to a Crimea-style infiltration of irregular forces.

In both cases, the report writers find, the exercises focused on what the two sides perceive to be their most vulnerable areas, with and Nato moving to defend the Baltic States and Russia rushing reinforcements to the Arctic, its Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, occupied Crimea, and Sakhalin island in the far east.

Allied Shield also included the first deployment of the Very High Readiness Taskforce, a rapid-reaction unit established at the Nato summit in Wales in 2014 in response to the annexation of Crimea.

The exercise, called ‘Noble Jump’, deployed 2,100 troops in a simulated a response to ‘unattibutable infiltration by an ally by irregular or special forces’ – essentially the scenario seen in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine since Early 2014.

The report recommends improvements in Nato-Russian communication to avert near misses and suggests working on a new arms treaty to restrict the use of conventional forces in Europe.

“If Russia or NATO decides at some point that they want to reduce tensions, showing restraint in terms of size or scenarios used for the exercises might be a good place to start,” the report writers conclude.

Source: The Telegraph

Breathable booze thrill Britons

Britons, it seems, are thrilled about the new entry in the capital’s already saturated drinking scene: breathable booze.

The pop-up bar, Alcoholic Architecture, uses a humidifier to pump a gin and tonic vapor into an enclosed space. Patrons absorb their alcohol from the “Cloud” by breathing in the vapors and by soaking it in through the skin and eyes.

Descending into a basement on the south bank of the Thames, customers are handed plastic ponchos to prevent the smell from permeating their hair and clothes, then are led into a corner of the bar sheathed in plastic strips.

They walk in. And breathe. Deeply.

Sam Bompas, one of the project’s designers, says the alcohol “goes straight into the blood stream, bypassing the liver.” Patrons are limited to one hour in the Cloud so they don’t get too inebriated.

Medical experts don’t share his excitement. Dr. William Shanahan, a consultant psychiatrist at Nightingale Hospital, which specializes in addictions and mental disorders, called the method “a gimmick.”

“The alcohol avoids first pass metabolism in the liver and goes directly to the brain, which makes it much more intoxicating and the intoxication is very rapid,” he said. “This has the potential to cause serious side effects as well as brain damage in the developing young brain.”

Dr. Niall Campbell, an alcohol addiction specialist at the Priory Hospital in Roehampton, was even more blunt. “The last thing this country needs is another way of ingesting alcohol.”

Source: AP

Another wall goes up in Europe

Nearly three decades after US President Ronald Reagan issued his much-celebrated challenge to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, some Eastern European countries have once again begun floating the idea of building up walls in Europe, this time to keep people out. Latvia is the latest country to jump on the bandwagon.

Speaking to Latvian television on Monday, Latvian Internal Affairs Minister Rihards Kozlovskis noted that Latvia would need “four years and 17 million euros in order to fence itself off from Russia via a wall.”

Kozlovskis emphasized that the wall has been made a necessity by the growing influx of illegal immigrants from Central Asia and the Far East who are using Russia as a transfer point on their way to Scandinavia. According to Radio Poland, 239 illegal immigrants have been detained by Latvian border services since the beginning of 2015, 160 of them from Vietnam, and 20 from Afghanistan.

The minister noted that the proposed wall’s price tag should be taken into account by the country’s government in planning for the country’s next budget.

Latvia far from being alone among European nations in its plans to build security walls to keep illegal immigrants out, even if its location next to the Russian border might seem like an odd choice, to say the least.

The Bulgarian government has recently extended its advanced network of border fencing with Turkey, aimed at completely sealing off the border with the Middle Eastern country.

Hungary has also received a lot of flak for passing a law enabling the construction of a metal fence along its border with Serbia, critics dubbing the project a new ‘iron curtain’.

Source: Sputniknews

Finnish politician wants to ‘fight multiculturalism to the end’

A Finnish member of parliament has come under fire for a comment he made over the weekend decrying the “nightmare called multiculturalism” and rallying his compatriots to fight for “one true Finnish nation.”

The MP, Olli Immonen, is a member of the populist and nationalist Finns Party, which is part of the country’s governing coalition. In a posting on his Facebook page late Friday night, Immonen said he is “dreaming of a strong, brave nation that will defeat this nightmare called multiculturalism. This ugly bubble that our enemies live in, will soon enough burst into a million little pieces.”

“Our lives are entwined in a very harsh times [sic],” Immonen said. “These are the days, that will forever leave a mark on our nations [sic] future. I have strong belief in my fellow fighters. We will fight until the end for our homeland and one true Finnish nation. The victory will be ours.”

The Finns Party scored 17.7 percent of the vote in Finland’s election in April, making it the second biggest party in the Finnish parliament and earning it a place as a partner in the country’s governing coalition. The party has a strong anti-immigration stance.

Finland’s mainstream political leaders reacted with strong criticism of the remarks.

“I want to develop Finland as an open, linguistically and culturally international country,” tweeted Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipilä on Sunday afternoon. “I cannot accept Immonen’s remarks.

Finnish Finance Minister Alex Stubb tweeted: “Multiculturalism is an asset. That’s all I have to say.”

Immonen also attracted controversy in June when he posed for a photograph with members of a far-right group called the Finnish Resistance Movement. – politico.eu