Tag: BELGIUM

Italian integration “boot camp” forces migrants to do free community work, sing the national anthem and wear “thank you” printed clothes

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At the mayor-founded academy in Bergamo, a group of about 30 uniformed migrants form two neat rows, hands behind their straight backs in a military-style “at ease” position.

In the corridor of a building, they repeat in chorus: “We are the students of the first course of the Accademia dell’Integrazione Grazie Bergamo, Thank you Bergamo”.

Then they break ranks, line up two by two and move to a larger room, where two of the students, wearing white aprons, begin serving lunch.

The “students” are asylum seekers and participating in a boot-camp style one-year programme whose explicit purpose is to integrate migrants.

Participants attend Italian-language classes, get internships at factories in the area and have to follow a strict routine.

They also have to do community service work for free.

The academy’s students can only use their smartphones for a few hours a day. For the best part of the day, their rooms are empty, with perfectly made beds. No language other than Italian is allowed. And they look more like cadets than students.

They must always wear a uniform and have three kinds of outfits.

When they are inside, it is a blue tracksuit with the words “Grazie Bergamo” in large print on the back; the second uniform is orange, similar to waste collectors, and also bears the words “Grazie Bergamo” in large print; the third, worn in free time, is a blue shirt and grey sweater with a small school logo, which also allows them to take the city’s public transportation free of charge.

“This is not a school for everyone”, Giorgio Gori, mayor of Bergamo, a wealthy city in northern Italy, about 50km east of Milan, told Al Jazeera.

It’s no place for slackers, he says, because participants “must respect a series of rules of cohabitation” and professional training is mandatory, “with the aim of getting them to a job”.

To get into the programme, participants must pass three interviews assessing their knowledge of Italian, the level of schooling and their ability to respect the rules.

Christophe Sanchez, the mayor’s chief of staff, who created the academy, believes that Italy’s system of asylum seekers’ management is not working and attributes its failure to the fact that they have rights but few duties: “Asylum seekers can stay in bed all day and there is no legal instrument to force them to do something.”

The underlying message of the academy seems to be that participants must demonstrate that they are hardworking people, that they really like Italy and are not troublemakers – in other words, that they deserve to stay.

The fact that the programme includes free-of-charge community work, not to mention the “Thank you” part in the name, gives the impression that migrants must be grateful.
Stefano Quadri, an activist from the Bergamo migrante antirazzista group, an anti-racist organisation, objects to the idea that migrants need to prove they deserve to be hosted, since asylum is a human right, and says free labour “destroys the local economy”.
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A worker at the Ruah coop, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, is worried that students live in relative isolation, with little contact with locals: “Integration means inserting a person in society,” he said.
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But organisers brush off criticism, saying that the programme is effective.
“We have so far done 380 hours of volunteer work and all our students understand Italian”, says Sanchez.
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As for the free labour, Gori insists it is not really free: “Between food, lodging and classes, we are investing 1,000 euros per months on each of them, so in a way they are getting paid.”
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NYT Chief WH Correspondent: Here’s The Real Reason Obama Didn’t Address Russian Meddling In 2016

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton

“…if I speak out more, he’ll just say it’s rigged…”

By JAMES BARRETT

In his recently updated and expanded book on former President Obama, “Obama: The Call Of History,” The New York Times’ Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker addresses several hot-button topics, including why Obama failed to adequately address Russian meddling ahead of the 2016 election and his response to “buffoonish showman” Donald Trump shocking the world by defeating Hillary Clinton, a response that involved “multiple emotional stages.”

In one of the sections of the book highlighted by The Daily Mail Friday, Baker peels back the curtain on why Obama was so weak in his response to Russian meddling ahead of the election in 2016 — something for which Trump has hammered Obama amid all the Robert Mueller-debunked “collusion” allegations.
“Anything the Russians did concerning the 2016 Election was done while Obama was President. He was told about it and did nothing! Most importantly, the vote was not affected,” Trump tweeted last month.
Screen Shot 2019-05-03 at 11.01.00 AM

The reason Obama didn’t act more decisively and rebuke Russia more directly, says Baker is that he feared that it might “escalate” the Russian interference campaign. This cautious approach, Baker suggests, flows out of Obama’s “don’t do stupid sh**” foreign policy philosophy, an approach for which Obama has been criticized in the past.

But fearing the escalation of the campaign wasn’t the only reason Obama didn’t act more forcefully, says Baker: Obama reportedly once admitted that “if I speak out more, he’ll just say it’s rigged.”

According to Baker, in one meeting Obama — who was convinced like most of the political establishment that Clinton was going to win — said confidently that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “backed the wrong horse” by supposedly helping Trump’s campaign.

As the Daily Mail notes, it was only after the election, which Trump won in stunning fashion, that Obama finally took action against the Russians as punishment for the meddling his administration had known about for months. Obama’s decision to expel a bunch of Russian diplomats conveniently fed into the “collusion” narrative that had already gotten rolling and which the election’s loser, Clinton, helped promote.

The Daily Mail also draws attention to another juicy passage in the book which reveals new details about Obama’s response to Trump’s upset victory over the woman who was supposed to protect Obama’s legacy.

Accoring to Baker, Obama watched the Marvel film “Dr. Strange” on election night with Michelle and Valerie Jarrett. At one point, Baker writes, Obama received an update on his phone and said, “Huh. Results in Florida are looking kind of strange.”

While Michelle went to sleep early, Obama stayed up and witnessed Trump’s devastating defeat of Clinton, which Baker suggests Obama found unthinkable because he thought there was “no way Americans would turn on him.”

According to Baker, Obama phoned Clinton at 1 a.m. and advised her to concede quickly, advice she didn’t take. In response, she supposedly said, “I’m sorry for letting you down.”

Obama and his team, Baker says, did in fact feel that Clinton had let them down. “To Obama and his team … the real blame lay squarely with Clinton. She was the one who could not translate his strong record and healthy economy into a winning message.”

Related: BOMBSHELL: Ukraine Embassy Says DNC Operative Reached Out For Dirt On Trump In 2016, Report Says

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POYNTER ‘BLACKLIST’ OF CONSERVATIVE NEWS SITES WAS CREATED BY SPLC EMPLOYEE

Poynter ‘Blacklist’ of Conservative News Sites Was Created by SPLC Employee

List contains sites such as Free Beacon, Daily Caller, Breitbart

By Joe Schoffstall

A journalism institute released a “blacklist” of media outlets they deemed as “unreliable” that was created by an employee of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center and overwhelmingly contains conservative new media outlets.

The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a Florida-based nonprofit journalism school, released the list on Wednesday and declared dozens of mainstream conservative sites such as the Washington Free Beacon, Daily Caller, Daily Signal, CNS News, and Breitbart as “unreliable” while listing few liberal sites,” Newsbusters reports. 

The study notes it trimmed the list “by removing several sites whose stories, though highly politicized, were mostly not fake: alternet.org, cato.org, heritage.org, nationalreview.com, thedailybeast.com, the intercept.com, thinkprogress.org, and weeklystandard.com.”

A majority of the removed sites lean left. Of the removed conservative sites, the Heritage Foundation, a think tank – and not in itself a news site — was taken off the list. However, the Daily Signal, which is hosted by the Heritage Foundation, is included on the list. Another conservative site that was removed from the list, the Weekly Standard, was shuttered in December.

While most of the sites are labeled as “unreliable”, “fake”, or “conspiracy” – or a combination of the three — the Free Beacon is listed as “bias”, a label that prompted further review of the sites that were ultimately removed from the list upon further review and before its release.

Barrett Golding, an employee at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left nonprofit embroiled in controversy over accusations of internal racism from its top management that led to its co-founder, Morris Dees, and president, Richard Cohen, being ousted from the group, created the list for Poynter.

Golding appears to have followed the SPLC “list” model in its creation of “unreliable” news sites, as many of the mainstream conservative sites on the list are thrown in with actual sites that push conspiracy theories. This mirrors the SPLC’s “hate group” list, which contains mainstream conservative organizations alongside racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC’s “hate” list, which it is perhaps best known for today, has helped the controversial — and allegedly internally racist group itself towards its black employees – to garner more than $500 million in total assets, $120 million of which is parked overseas.

“These sites stood next to conservative organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented baker Jack Phillips in the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission,” Newsbusters writes. “While the ADF is not a news site, it was likely targeted because Golding works for the SPLC. The ADF is considered a ‘hate group’ by the SPLC and is marked on the ‘hate map.’ The Washington Post even questioned SPLC’s ‘political activism’ and ‘bias.'”

“SPLC has been dropped by Twitter from its Trust and Safety Council and slammed by the mainstream media after multiple scandals rocked the organization. Its hate map even helped shooter Floyd Lee Corkins find the location of the Family Research Council, where he shot and wounded five people.”

Factcheck.org, Fake News Codex, OpenSources, and PolitiFact were also involved in the study alongside Golding.

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SWEDISH DOCTOR SAYS DEADLY PARASITIC DISEASE HAS DOUBLED SINCE ‘REFUGEE’ WAVE

Swedish Doctor Says Deadly Parasitic Disease Has Doubled Since 'Refugee' Wave

“Most people are sick from Syria and Afghanistan”

 | Infowars.com – MAY 2, 2019

An infectious diseases doctor has warned that the number of cases in Sweden of Leishmaniasis, a parasitic disease which can lead to death, has doubled since the 2015 migrant wave.

“Leishmaniasis is a disease caused by an intracellular protozoan parasite (genus Leishmania) transmitted by the bite of a female phlebotomine sandfly,” according to Medscape.

The parasites that spread the disease are common in the Middle East, Africa and in Mediterranean countries, however it is not normally present in northern Europe.

According to Sara Karlsson Söbirk, an infectious doctor at a hospital in Helsingborg who has studied the issue for 20 years, the number of cases in on the increase.

“We have in a collaboration with the Public Health Authority looked at the number of cases between 1993-2016 and see a peak of 35 cases in 2016, probably a direct consequence of the large refugee wave the year before, when most people are sick from Syria and Afghanistan,” said Söbirk.

She notes that most of the cases were found in people who had emigrated to Sweden or who had traveled in the countries where the parasite was present then returned to Sweden.

The parasites can remain in the body for years before being activated as a result of a weak immune system.

“The attack on internal organs is the most serious form of the disease (visceral leishmaniasis) and usually leads to death if it is not detected and treated in time,” reports FriaTider.

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Austria: Asylum seekers make death threats against asylum centre employees

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Information from the Austrian Interior Ministry has revealed that asylum home staff members have faced numerous threats on their lives from resentful asylum seekers. According to the ministry, no less than 15 serious incidents have occurred in the last year.

As reported by Kronen Zeitung, the information came about in response to a question posed to Austria’s Interior Minister Herbert Kickl of the national populist Freedom Party.

According to the report, many of those seeking asylum have made violent threats against asylum centre employees in order to be transferred to different facilities. In Maria Enzerdorf, a small Austrian town of 8,000 people, an asylum seeker intimated an employee with an iron bar simply because he felt like he should be moved to another location.

Varying motivations have acted as catalysts for additional incidents of death threats made against public employees.

In Salzburg, a migrant threatened to murder an employee over food.

In Bergheim, due to a lack of internet access, two migrants became so incensed that they threaten to kill one of the care workers.

A similar case occurred in Italy last year when a 26-year-old Senegalese migrant physically assaulted an asylum home worker because the home hadn’t apparently attended to his requests to set up wireless internet.

Several cases in Austrian asylum homes have also turned physical with a number of employees asserting that migrants have attempted to intimate workers by puffing their chests out at them as well as at staff security guards. In another instance, a conflict with one of the migrants resulted in a worker being injured.

Although none of the attacks mentioned resulted in severe or life-threatening injuries, several government employees working in asylum care in different European countries have been murdered by migrants since the migrant crisis began in 2015.

One of these tragic cases unfolded in 2016 when a Somalian asylum seeker by the name of Youssaf Nuur stabbed to death 22-year-old caseworker Alexandra Mezher.

In 2017, a similar attack happened in Germany when a Nigerian migrant stabbed to death asylum worker Soopika P. in the municipality of Ahaus.

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Tear gas fired during May Day demonstrations in Paris, scores detained

CAP

Demonstrators marching in Paris to mark International Workers’ Day have been met with tear gas, images from the French capital show, with reports of over 350 people detained.

The procession was scheduled to start at 2:30pm local time but clashes have already erupted between riot police and protesters who have turned out in their thousands. Huge plumes of smoke can be seen rising from tear gas canisters or smoke grenades along the protest route.

CAP

Some 380 protestors were arrested on Wednesday and more than 17,700 “preventive checks” carried out by police, according to French reports.

Meanwhile, France Info reports that a group of between 200 and 300 protesters tried to break into a police station in Besançon, eastern France. Local authorities said efforts were made to break into the station via the car park behind the building, but were repelled by police using tear gas.

In Paris, protesters in some parts of the city have begun erecting barricades to block the advance of charging riot police. According to the latest media reports, 14 police officers sustained injuries.

CAP

Journalists at the scene reported seeing protesters throwing projectiles at police, who continued to charge the crowd and fire gas canisters. Several protesters and at least one policemen have reportedly been injured in the clashes.

Demonstrators including Yellow Vest protesters, labor unions, pensioners, and students are marching through the streets of Paris to celebrate International Workers’ Day. Each year, May 1 is marked by large demonstrations of workers and labor activists who organize marches to campaign for improved working conditions and other social issues.

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