Tag: CZECH REPUBLIC

Biden Says Margaret Thatcher, Who Died in 2013, Contacted Him to Complain About Trump

CAP

Another major gaffe for the former Vice President.

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Former vice president and 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden said that several heads of state, including the deceased Margaret Thatcher, have reached out to him to express their concern about President Donald J. Trump.

“Biden also told donors that he’s heard from 14 heads of state from around the world who’ve voiced concerns to him about Trump,” according to Bloomberg. “That list included Margaret Thatcher, he said, before correcting what he called a ‘Freudian slip,’ that he was actually referring to current British Prime Minister Theresa May.”

“Margaret Thatcher, um, excuse me, Margaret Thatcher – Freudian slip – but I knew her too… The Prime Minister of Great Britain Theresa May,” he reportedly said while listing off names of those who are concerned with Trump’s presidency.

Thatcher left political office in 1990.

Biden was speaking a $2,800 per head fundraiser in Columbia, S.C. on Saturday night. The 76-year-old candidate has faced mounting questions about his age as he kicks off his presidential bid. Last week, he slurred and rambled through a speech to union members in Pennsylvania last week.

Big League Politics reported:

Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden slurred his way through a rambling speech Monday at a Teamster local hall in Pittsburgh. Biden is clearly focusing on the Midwest and on union voters, and though he has a good chance of cutting into President Trump’s lead there Trump still has the support of many rank-and-file union members if not the leadership.

Biden’s speech was less than inspiring:

Biden also landed in hot water over comments about visiting inner-city communities, which he called “the hood” at a campaign stop in Iowa.

“Through a program, we had through community colleges, we said look, put together a program for us where we could teach people how to code,” he said. “We went out, literally into the hood, and they found, turns out, 54 [people], they happened to be all women, the vast majority were women of color, no more than a high school degree, aged 25-54, and a third of them only had GEDs.”

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Chicago Cubs investigate after fan appears to flash ‘white power symbol’ on live TV (VIDEO)

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MLB team the Chicago Cubs are investigating after a fan at Tuesday night’s game against the Miami Marlins allegedly made a symbol on live TV associated with white supremacists.

As reporter Doug Glanville – a former Cubs player – was making a live broadcast for NBC Sports Chicago at Wrigley Field, a fan was seen in a gray Cubs hoodie behind him.

After shifting position, the fan appears to make an upside-down ‘OK sign’, which is sometimes associated with white supremacy.

The Cubs are looking into the matter, issuing a statement saying: “An individual seated behind Mr. Glanville used what appears to be an offensive hand gesture that is associated with racism.

“Such ignorant and repulsive behavior is not tolerated at Wrigley Field.

“We are reviewing the incident thoroughly because no one should be subjected to this type of offensive behavior.

“Any individual behaving in this manner will not only be removed from the ballpark, but will be permanently banned from Wrigley Field.”

READ MORE: Pitcher Perfect: Baseball star Ryan Braun soaked in beer while attempting to make catch (VIDEO)

It’s unclear whether the man was attempting to form the ‘OK symbol’ without any malicious intent. The gesture is seen as a clear racist sign by some, or by others as simply the originally innocuous meaning which has been distorted in a hoax to trigger liberals.

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‘We feel alien at home’: Austrians flood popular newspaper with desperate messages over migration

CAP

Austria’s largest newspaper has received an unexpected response after its columnist claimed that the term “population replacement” was not appropriate for the Alpine land. Hundreds of people said it is the reality they live in.

Austria’s Kronen Zeitung daily has admitted that it received“hundreds” of letters from its readers in just over a week, after they said they felt like foreigners in their own homeland because of mass immigration.

The strong response was provoked by the paper’s columnist, Conny Bischofberger. In an interview with Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache, she called the notion of “population replacement” a concept used by “far-right extremists.”

ALSO ON RT.COMIntegration failure: Report finds 51% Vienna pupils don’t speak German at home

The term, which describes the gradual replacement of a native population by immigrants, is popular among those on the far-right. They use it to portray growing ethnic and religious diversity as a result of some deliberate malicious actions taken by “anti-popular forces.”

After she was confronted by people asking why they should not use the term, Bischofberger dismissed it in an explanatory piece as a conspiracy theory and a mere “feeling” that “may or may not correspond with the real general demographic developments.” However, she apparently failed to strike a chord with Kronen Zeitung readers, who sought to explain that this was a reality they have been living with for years.

On the streets, on public transport and in the municipal buildings: We feel alien at home.

“We were a happy household until 10 years ago. Then everything collapsed like a house of cards,” one person wrote to the newspaper.

“The mood in our condominium has deteriorated so much that we (65 and 68) are ready to move away to finally be able to live in peace again,” another couple wrote.

CAP

“Foreign-language parents with their children do not bother to speak our language… It’s sad, but one doesn’t feel well anymore,” another message read.

In our elementary school, no more excursions are conducted out of consideration for foreign languages, the diet is adapted to religious wishes and the violence of the foreign elementary school boys is frightening.

After receiving hundreds of similar messages, Bischofberger still insisted that, for many people, the notion of “population replacement” came in handy as it allowed them “not to think about the problem behind” mass immigration. However, she also admitted that “it would be cheap to defame all those people, who wrote to the Kronen Zeitung, as xenophobes, racists or far-right extremists.”

Those people were apparently asked “to accept too much migration” and did not receive enough attention from the authorities, the columnist said.

ALSO ON RT.COMTwitter up in arms after ex-Austrian MP says that girls wear headscarves to avoid migrant assaults

Austria took in one of the largest numbers of asylum seekers per capita during the refugee crisis. Some 150,000 people were accepted by the Alpine land since 2015 – which accounts for over one percent of its total population. Such developments gave rise to widespread anti-immigrant sentiment and brought a conservative coalition to power, which adopted a strict stance on migration.

Foreigners constitute 15.8 percent of the Austrian population, and 29.6 percent in the capital, Vienna, according to a 2018 survey. In February, a former MP from the conservative Austrian People’s Party, Marcus Franz, sparked a heated discussion on social media by saying that Austrian-born girls wear headscarves to prevent assaults from migrants on the streets of Vienna.

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Report: Facebook Sets Up ‘War Room’ for European Elections

Zuckerberg to face pressure on taxes in meeting with Macron

By Lucas Nolan

Politico recently profiled Facebook’s new “European election war room” ahead of upcoming E.U. elections.

A recent report from Politico provides an insight into Facebook’s new “election war room” established ahead of the upcoming European election. Facebook has previously deployed a similar “war room” in the United States ahead of the midterm elections in November 2018. In October, Breitbart News reported on the war room providing an insight into the aim of the project. Facebook’s Product Manager of Civic Engagement, Samidh Chakrabarti, said in an interview that the war room is a physical room which will be used to “take quick and decisive action” against possible cases of foreign interference during the midterm elections.

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“We have many measures that we’ve put in place to try to prevent problems: the political ad transparency, blocking fake accounts, combating foreign interference, and preventing the spread of misinformation. But we know we have to be ready for anything that happens,” stated Chakrabarti. “And so that’s why we’ve been building this war room, a physical war room [with] people across the company, of all different disciplines, who are there. So, as we discover problems that may come up in the hours leading up to the election, we can take quick and decisive action.”

Now, Politico has reported on the company’s efforts to establish a similar project in Dublin, Ireland ahead of the upcoming European elections. Politico described the project writing:

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The group of twentysomething coders, engineers and content specialists sit hunched over multiple screens, scanning the platform for potential illegal behavior. Wall-mounted television monitors keep them up to date on the latest chatter on the world’s largest social network, Instagram and WhatsApp. A single European Union flag hangs on the wall, next to a poster emblazoned with the slogan “New Ways of Seeing.”

Yet despite Facebook’s  40-person European election “operations center,” which got underway on April 29, the tech giant is struggling to keep on top of the threats.
Political groups from Hungary to Spain have been able to circumvent Facebook’s new political transparency tools to quietly buy partisan social media advertising aimed at swaying potential voters, according to an analysis by POLITICO. That includes paid-for messages by Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, Verein Recht und Freiheit (Association for the Conservation of the Rule of Law and Civil Liberties), a support group for right-wing politicians in Germany and Petra De Sutter, a Belgian candidate for the Green Party.

It seems that Facebook is aware, however, of accusations of censorship and bias. The company’s chief lobbyist in Europe told Politico that Facebook is avoiding taking too harsh a line on the content allowed on the platform:

“We recognize that some people think we should remove everything,” said Richard Allan, Facebook’s chief lobbyist in Europe, in reference to the reams of political content now flooding the digital platform. “But we have concerns of removing everything during a political election.”

“We don’t believe it’s the right place to be for us to be the regulator of political campaigns,” he added. Facebook may not want the role, but its global reach puts it at the heart of the democratic process from France to the Philippines.

 

Politico described the new Dublin team tasked with monitoring misinformation, writing:

The team, which includes speakers of all of the EU’s 24 official languages, is split along national boundaries, with specialists — primarily men who would not look out of place in any startup office — monitoring activity on both Facebook’s social media platforms and those of rivals, notably Google and Twitter.

Facebook would not say how much content the group reviews daily, though each Facebook staffer had multiple screens open monitoring news events and other political discussions online.

Once an issue is flagged, Facebook’s engineers can then work with their counterparts across Europe and elsewhere to determine if the activity infringes the company’s standards, and then delete, play down or leave the content on the network, depending on the outcome. Topics for review include possible misinformation, voter suppression and hate speech, and the company said that it had investigated hundreds of incidents within the last week.

“Even though we’re a tech company, speaking face to face is invaluable,” said Sturdy, the Facebook executive.

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Watch out, Islamophobia? America’s ‘first Muslim patrol’ hits streets of Brooklyn (VIDEO)

CAP

They’re not cops or armed vigilantes, but Brooklyn’s new ‘Muslim patrol’ hopes to work with police to help make their neighborhood more Muslim-friendly. RT’s Caleb Maupin joined the patrol on its beat.

Founded by a Yemeni migrant and boasting at least 30 members, the Muslim Community Patrol’s (MCP) main aim is to be the “eyes and ears” of Brooklyn’s Muslim community. With uniforms and marked cars complete with sirens, the group could easily be mistaken for regular police – but don’t be fooled. The patrolmen are unarmed and have no police powers. Instead, the group radios to police if they encounter something that requires police action – or firepower. The volunteer-based organization is believed to be the first Muslim ‘patrol’ of its kind in the United States.

The patrol was founded in response to concerns over an uptick in Islamophobia, but they do much more than just patrol the streets. One volunteer who spoke with Maupin said that the group offers counseling, feeds the homeless, and participates in other community outreach projects.

“We’re here to help bridge the community together,” the volunteer said.

Local residents who spoke to RT seemed supportive of the initiative, although a few said the patrol, which mirrors similar groups created by Hasidic and Asian communities in Brooklyn, was cause for concern.

https://www.rt.com/usa/458379-muslim-patrol-brooklyn-police/

 

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Shock Video: Muslim Children in Philadelphia Perform Anti-Israel School Play: ‘We Will Chop Off Their Heads’ to Liberate Al Aqsa Mosque and Jerusalem

by Kristinn Taylor May 3, 2019

Video released Friday by the non-partisan research group MEMRI, which translated the Arabic into English, taken from a Facebook posting by the Muslim American Society Philadelphia chapter last month shows a group of Muslim children in Palestinian scarves performing at a Ummah Day celebration where they sang a pro-Palestine and recited a poem calling for the liberation of Jerusalem and its Al Aqsa mosque that says “We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque… We will subject them to eternal torture.”

(UPDATE: A different video clip mentions “Zionists”) Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, so the heads they would be chopping off would belong to Jews.

Screen images with translations. In one image, children in the back row are seen lifting Korans high over their heads during the song.

MEMRI’s description of the video with translation:

On April 22, 2019, the Muslim American Society Islamic Center in Philadelphia (MAS Philly) uploaded a video of an “Ummah Day” celebration to its Facebook page in which young children wearing Palestinian scarves sang: “Glorious steeds call us and lead us [to] the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The blood of martyrs protects us… Take us, oh ships… until we reach our shores and crush the treacherous ones… Flow, oh rivers of martyrs!” A young girl read a poem praising martyrs who sacrificed their lives for Palestine, and she asked: “Will [Jerusalem] be a hotbed for cowards?” Another young girl read: “We will defend [Palestine] with our bodies… We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque… We will subject them to eternal torture.”

MAS Philly belongs to the Muslim American Society (MAS), which has 42 chapters in the United States and one in the United Kingdom. MAS’ website says that its mission is to “move people to strive for God-consciousness, liberty and justice, and to convey Islam with utmost clarity,” and that its vision is “a virtuous and just American society.”

 

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Hungary will not soften laws to allow Soros college to stay in the country

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Hungary will not relax rules for international universities despite pressure from the EU and offers from Germany to mediate in a row over a college founded by US billionaire George Soros, a government spokesman said.

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Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a nationalist who has often clashed with the European Union, has been accused of restricting academic freedom with his new higher education rules, which the Central European University said forced it out of the country.
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“There is no change in our core view”, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs told Reuters.
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“We will not change the laws and regulations that govern higher education in Hungary. We still operate on that basis.”
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Central European University, set up by Soros, will move part of its operations to Austria from September because of rules forbidding it to issue US degrees.
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The dispute, often seen as a proxy for disagreements between Soros and Orbán on migration, is one of the main issues that caused the European Peoples’ Party to suspend Orbán’s Fidesz before European Parliament elections.
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At the initiative of Manfred Weber, the EPP’s lead candidate to head the EU executive after the May elections, the government of the German state of Bavaria and the Technical University of Munich stepped in to help.
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Offering three new professorships and new courses to augment CEU’s teaching, they said they would open a way for CEU to issue international degrees.
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A Hungarian government official told an opposition member of the Budapest parliament that Hungary considered Bavarian participation in the Hungarian higher education sector “a step that builds trust”.
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And Balazs Orbán, a state secretary on the prime minister’s staff, said the government was “ready to examine the possibility for issuing diplomas recognized in the United States and Germany as well as in Hungary”.
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However, he reiterated that all universities had to comply with Hungarian law, and Zoltan Kovacs also made it clear that Bavarian participation, while welcome, would lead to no legal amendments.
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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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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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