Europe

19, March 2017

Paris: Flights resume at airport after attempted attack ⁰

Flights have resumed at Paris’ Orly Airport one day after a man was shot and killed while attempting to stage a shooting attack. Officials announced on Sunday that schedules at Orly, which is Paris’ second-biggest airport and serves domestic and international flights, were returning to “normal.”

On Saturday, a 39-year-old French national identified as Ziyed Ben Belgacem, carrying a petrol can in his backpack, grabbed a soldier’s gun and fired shots before he was gunned down by security forces. One soldier was reportedly slightly wounded in the incident, but no one else was harmed. Severe chaos was also caused in flight schedules for several hours following the shooting.

French anti-terror investigators, who took into custody Belgacem’s father, brother, and cousin following the incident, released the father but held the other two as they sought to build a profile of the assailant. An autopsy is to be carried to determine if the attacker was under influence as a small amount of cocaine was found during a search of his apartment in a northern Paris suburb.

Police said Belgacem had had a record of criminal activities and had been known to authorities. Since September last year, he had been under judicial monitoring. He had also shown signs of radicalization, although there was no indication immediately that he had traveled abroad.

The Saturday shooting comes as France remains in a state of emergency over terrorist attacks. The emergency state was initially imposed in November 2015, when terrorist attacks in and around Paris killed 130 people and injured 350 others. The emergency rule has been extended several times because the French government believes the risk of terror attacks remains high.

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16, February 2017

EU’s Mogherini says Never seen US so polarized and divided ⁰

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini has warned that the current polarization and division in the US may result in destabilizing the rest of the world.

“I have never seen the US so polarized, divided and burdened by conflicts as now. However, the one who would like to play a global leadership role needs to be internally strong, self-confident and cohesive,” said Mogherini during an interview with German-language newspaper Die Welt published on Wednesday.

She stressed that the current tensions in the new US administration may become a “destabilizing factor” for the rest of the world.

Mogherini made the remarks shortly after a trip to Washington, where she met with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, US President Donald Trump’s aide and son-in-law Jared Kushner and several other officials.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (R) meets with European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini at the State Department in Washington, DC, on February 9, 2017.

‘Widening US-EU rift’

She added that while several key elements of the new US administration’s foreign policy remain obscure, future EU policies should be aimed at finding out “where our positions coincide.” “In the future there may be more topics, on which the European Union and the United States will have different positions,” she added.

The 2016 presidential election in the US exposed more than ever the deep division within the society in which minor groups, including Muslims, African Americans and Hispanics, are marginalized.

Despite tapping into the division, Trump managed to gain electoral victory and became president but lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million ballots.

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12, February 2017

French police stealing homeless refugees’ blankets in freezing conditions ⁰

French police are stealing blankets and sleeping bags from refugees who are forced to sleep in freezing conditions in Paris, says a report. According to an exclusive report published by The Independent on Saturday, police in the French capital are also using teargas on men, women and children refugees and “violently” forcing them out of the city.

Several Eritrean families said that police told them to “get out of France” while officers took their blankets in terrible weather conditions, with temperatures reaching below -7 degrees Celsius.

“While we were there we witnessed the police taking people’s belongings – some in the night, some in the daytime – it’s quite a visible phenomenon,” said the deputy director of the Refugee Rights Data Project, Natalie Stanton. “The same night the government announced a plan to keep everyone warm, we witnessed police picking up blankets and putting them in a big rubbish bin on the back of a truck, then driving away,” she added.

According to the report, around two thirds of the refugees interviewed said they were woken in the middle of the night by police and forced to relocate. Around half of those interviewed reported the incident as being violent.

One middle-aged man said that the police had kicked him so hard that he was forced to stay in hospital for 20 days. Some others said that the police used teargas against them when they did not immediately comply. “If we question them or say we have nowhere to go, they bring out the teargas,” said an Afghan refugee.

Refugees queue up in front of the refugee reception platform of France Terre d’asile NGO on boulevard de la Villette, northern Paris on January 26, 2017. (Photos by AFP)

“Some people had such horrendous experiences during their journeys that it’s just another problem,” said Stanton, noting that most of the refugees were “shocked” by the treatment they received in France. “They were thinking they would have somewhere safe to sleep,” she added.

Over 340 refugees and people displaced by war in their countries — staying on the streets of Paris’s La Chapelle district — were interviewed for the report. Most hailed from Afghanistan, the rest were from mainly African nations.

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9, February 2017

UK: House of Commons gives green light to Brexit ⁰

British MPs pass a bill that allows Prime Minister Theresa May to start negotiations on Brexit. Lawmakers in the House of Commons voted 494 by 122 Wednesday for a law that enables May to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to start formal negotiations on leaving the European Union.The article would initiate two years of talks between London and the 28-nation bloc.

May attempted to get the article 50 bill through the House of Commons without any change, hoping for initiation of negotiations before the end of March, while MPs made efforts to have more say in the process but to no avail. “This, elementally, is a straightforward bill which serves only to give the prime minister the power to trigger Article 50 and thereby respect the result of the referendum,” said Brexit Secretary David Jones.

Meanwhile on Wednesday, the shadow business secretary, Clive Lewis, resigned from his post, arguing that he will not “vote for something I believe will ultimately harm the city I have the honor to represent, love and call home.”

“I will continue to support our party and our leader from the back benches to the very best of my ability,” he said. Last year, nearly 52 percent of Britons voted to end their country’s decades-long membership in the 28-nation bloc. Ahead of the June referendum, two third of the MPs had campaigned for staying in the EU. The bill should now move to the House of Lords, where the prime minister’s Conservative party does not enjoy a majority.

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29, January 2017

Italy: Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi faces new trial ⁰

A court in Italy has ordered a new trial for three-time ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi on corruption charges, creating a new obstacle to his bid to return to office. Milan Judge Carlo Ottone De Marchi scheduled the new trial for Berlusconi on April 5, local media reported on Saturday.

The 80-year-old former Italian statesman allegedly paid as much as 10 million euros and gave expensive gifts to young women to “buy” their silence in various other court cases involving him. The new trial is now aimed at determining whether the payments amounted to hush money and interfered in the other judicial proceedings.

Berlusconi has denied any wronging. One of his lawyers, Federico Cecconi, has said the new prosecution is “the first trial for the crime of generosity.” Berlusconi is the leader of Italy’s center-right Forza Italia Party, currently the opposition party in the parliament.

Last year, Berlusconi was tried for a sexual relationship with an underage teenager when he was premier and then using his influence to cover it up. While he was acquitted in that case, several other complaints of sexual misconduct have been filed against him, in addition to the accusations of financial corruption.

A 2013 tax fraud conviction forced him out of his Senate seat and barred him from holding public office for the next few years. Berlusconi has challenged the ban, taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights. Berlusconi eyes participating in Italy’s national elections, due in 2018, but his hopes for running for office may be dashed with the newly-scheduled trial.

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24, December 2016

Perpetrator of Berlin attack shot dead in Italy ⁰

A man believed to be the perpetrator of a Monday terrorist attack in the German city of Berlin has been killed in Italy. Italy’s interior minister confirmed that Anis Amri, wanted in the Berlin attack, was killed in a shootout with police in the northern Italian city of Milan on Friday. Minister Marco Minniti said that all the necessary checks were conducted after the shootout and that “the person killed, without a shadow of a doubt, is Anis Amri, the suspect of the [Berlin] terrorist attack.”Minniti said, however, that investigations were still in progress and that there could be “future developments.” A short video posted on the website of Italian magazine Panorama suggested that the shooting happened before dawn, with police gathered around a cordoned-off area in the dark.

Amri was the main suspect in an attack on a busy Berlin Christmas market on Monday. He allegedly ran a 40-ton truck into a crowd, killing 12 people and injuring 48 others. Shortly before the shootout in Italy, police in Denmark had said that a man matching his description had been seen in Aalborg in northern Denmark. Danish police said people had to keep away from the area as a security operation had been launched there.

German investigators had said they believed Amri was still laying low in Berlin because he was probably wounded, Der Tagesspiegel reported citing security sources. In the early hours of Friday, German special forces also arrested two men suspected of planning an attack on a shopping mall in the city of OberhausenIn in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, police said in a statement. A police spokesman said there was no connection between the Duisburg arrests and the Amri case.

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23, December 2016

Former Director of M16 says Germany overwhelmed by some 7000 “live” terrorists ⁰

A former director at the British MI6 has claimed that German intelligence authorities are overwhelmed by and are almost unable to track some 7,000 “live” terrorist cases in their country. Richard Barrett told the BBC Radio 4’s Today program that there were around 550 “really extreme potential terrorists on the books” in Germany.

“If you include all the Lander (local regions) in Germany, they have about 7,000 live cases,” he claimed. “As you can imagine, that is an almost impossible number to control.” Barrett is a former director of global counter-terrorism operations at the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as the MI6.

In addition, Barret said, a wider group of potential suspects were those who had “come to attention in this context of radical extremism,” and were therefore “worthy of investigation.” It was not clear whether Barret was citing official data from Germany and, if so, how he had obtained it; and there was no comment from German intelligence authorities as of Friday morning.

German security forces have been criticized for a recent terrorist attack in the country that killed 12 people and injured 50. The Takfiri Daesh terrorist group, which is mainly active in militancy in Iraq and Syria, claimed responsibility for the Monday attack. Germany security officials have identified the main suspect in the terrorist attack, in which a 40-ton truck was rammed into a busy Berlin Christmas market, as Anis Amri, a 24-year-old Tunisian asylum seeker.

Amri, who had been under surveillance by German intelligence after he arrived in the country in 2015 and had been arrested three times already this year, should have been deported several months ago as his asylum application had been rejected.

However, Amri’s deportation papers were never served to him as he slipped under the radar despite being a known radical extremist who is alleged to have received weapons training, possibly by Daesh militants. Police have now spread a dragnet to find Amri, who remains at large and possibly dangerous.

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19, December 2016

Warum????????? Truck plows into German Xmas market ⁰

At least nine people have been killed and over 50 others injured after a truck drove into a Christmas market in the German capital Berlin.

Berlin police have arrested the driver of the lorry that rammed into people shopping near the scene but say they are yet to confirm whether or not the attack was deliberate.

According to police reports, a second suspect, the co-driver of the truck, was killed during the crash. The Daesh Takfiri terrorist group has claimed responsibility for the attack in twitter. The attack took place in Breitscheidplatz, a major public square in the inner city of Berlin.

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8, December 2016

1,750 Takfiri terrorists may have returned to Europe ⁰

An EU report warns that a third of the estimated 5,000 European nationals who traveled to Iraq and Syria to join Takfiri terrorists have returned home, probably with a mission to launch attacks. The report, to be presented to EU interior ministers on Friday by the bloc’s counter-terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove, said as many as 1,750 Takfiri terrorists may have returned home. Fifty-percent of the terrorists remain in the battle theater, which amounted to between 2,000 and 2,500 Europeans, while between 15 to 20 percent of those who joined the terrorists have died, the report added.

There were two types of “foreign terrorist fighters” returning, the report said, identifying them as “those in the majority that will drift back, and those who will be sent back on specific missions, which are of most concern.” Even some European women and children born or raised in areas under the control of Daesh could present a security threat as they may have been influenced by the group’s Takfiri ideology, it added.

Some returnees have been convicted and serving prison sentences, while some others are being carefully monitored and some are free in their communities, the report said without giving any figures. Last month, Belgium warned that Takfiri terrorists were increasingly returning to Europe. Daesh claimed responsibility for March 22 Brussels attacks which killed 32 people. The attackers were linked to November 2015 attacks in Paris, which killed some 130 people.

According to the new report, “there is also a significant foreign terrorist fighter contingent with Daesh in Libya which might attempt to use their nationality or family connections to return to Europe.” It said the European Takfiris remain in touch with Daesh via social media networks, and are greatly migrating from the from mainstream Twitter social networking service to Telegram end-to-end-encrypted messaging service.

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30, November 2016

UK: Members of Parliament sexually harass young employees but can go unpunished ⁰

A Labour lawmaker in the United Kingdom has revealed that the Members of Parliament sexually harass young employees but can go unpunished as their victims feel helpless. Labor MP John Mann made the remarks at the House of Commons’ Standards Committee on Tuesday, saying that sexual assault by politicians at Westminster was a “major issue” to be addressed. “In here [Westminster], there are alleged sexual assaults by current members of Parliament and nowhere for people to go, or they don’t feel confident in going. That’s a major issue,” he said.

Mann called for the necessity of setting up a whistle-blowing service to help victims come forward, adding that the female employees did not feel secure to raise the issue. The lawmaker told the committee that he was aware of cases where staff had “significant issues” with the way current parliamentarians behave towards them but he was powerless to report colleagues to police because “there is no criminality” involved.

“That is not a matter of criminality but [one] that would be potentially an issue for whistle-blowing to make a complaint. The cases I am aware of, there is no criminality otherwise it would be very straightforward. I would be advising go to the police,” he said. In a shocking example, Mann said that older MPs would force young female interns to work late before “pressing” them into going home with them.

“There has been improper sexual behavior in this building that I am aware of with members of staff by Members of Parliament, including in recent times, the last two years, and I have had complaints of that, the individuals do not feel comfortable or confident, working in a political environment, of raising that issue and explicitly did not want me to raise the issue and therefore potentially have them named,” Mann noted.

UK MPs are already embroiled in other sexual scandals. In 2015 alone, reports by UK media reveled that over 247,000 attempts were made by users of the British parliament’s network to check out pornographic material.

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