Cologne police round up hundreds of men of apparently African descent in attempt to prevent repeat of last year's mass sexual assault as TWO women are attacked
Police in Cologne have detained hundreds of men 'seemingly of African descent' as part of operations to prevent a repeat of attacks in the German city a year ago.
Force chiefs said the men were detained at two main railway stations so officers could question them and check their identities.
Authorities deployed more than 1,500 officers across Cologne for new year celebrations in response to criticism that they failed to stop hundreds of robberies and sexual assaults last year, blamed largely on men of North African origin.
Some revellers this year complained on Twitter that police appeared to be detaining people based on their appearance.
By early Sunday police had received reports of two women being sexually assaulted in the city. One man was arrested and three remain on the run.
The number of police on duty last night, backed by up by hundreds of volunteers and public order officials, was ten times the number last year.
Fireworks were banned in and around the station and the cathedral outside, security zones checked the bags of revellers who came to watch a light show by a Berlin artist and anyone drunk or threatening was turned away.
There were locals who said the light-hearted spirit of New Year's Eve had evaporated due to the overwhelming security presence, but in the wake of the events of 2015 - and the truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin on December 19 - most were grateful for the police operation.
A police spokesman said: 'Overall the situation dissolved quickly and quietly because many parties left the city by train.'
Cologne Police President Jürgen Mathies said: 'On the whole, the security plan worked'.
In total six people were arrested in the course of the evening.
Police had installed new video surveillance cameras to monitor the station square after women were attacked nearby last year.
The attacks in the western German city fuelled criticism of Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to accept almost 900,000 migrants last year.
A leaked police document revealed the bulk of the crimes were committed in Cologne and Hamburg where 600 and 400 sexual assaults on women were reported respectively.
Authorities increased police presence at hotspots in the major cities, including Cologne.
SOURCE
Knife-wielding Afghan migrant 'stabs Christian woman, 50, because she was reading the Bible at the Austrian refugee centre where he lives'
An Afghan migrant attacked a Christian woman at an asylum centre because he could hear her reading the Bible. The 50-year-old was attacked in accommodation in Timelkam, Voecklamarkt in North Western Austria.
Her alleged attacker was a 22-year-old man from Afghanistan who had taken offence to the fact that the woman had been invited by Christian residents of the property to discuss the Bible.
When he found out what she was doing, he stormed into the kitchen where the woman was standing and tried to plunge the knife into her upper body.
Luckily her thick winter coat protected her from serious injury, but she did injure her ear when she fell backwards from the force of the man's violent blows.
When questioned by police, the man accepted he had overreacted but claimed he was suffering from 'personal problems'.
He was ordered remanded in custody and taken to Wels Prison in Upper Austria. It is unclear if he has been charged yet.
SOURCE
Campaign to attract women into Britain's elite commando unit manages to recruit just ONE - and she then failed the gruelling course
An 18-month campaign to attract women into Britain’s crack Commando unit attracted just one volunteer – and even she is believed to have failed the gruelling course.
Winning the right to have combat roles in the elite unit was celebrated as a triumph for equality.
Top brass offered volunteers a personalised training programme to ensure they were fully equipped to cope with the famous Green Beret endurance tests they would have to pass to take up arms alongside men in the Royal Marines.
But only one woman sailor took up the offer, and Marine sources told The Mail on Sunday that she had struggled with the physical challenges.
The Ministry of Defence refused to confirm or deny this, but the bandswoman wrote about her experiences in the latest issue of the Marines’ magazine, The Globe And Laurel.
SOURCE
Former Australian Prime Minister calls for Palestinian aid cut and embassy relocation to Jerusalem
Former prime minister Tony Abbott has called for Australia's $40 million in aid to Palestine to be cut, citing concerns over the Palestinian Authority's support for "terrorists and their families", and suggested the Australian embassy in Israel be moved to Jerusalem.
Mr Abbott's strongly pro-Israel declarations follow the United Nations Security Council's damning resolution on the country's construction of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.
The United Nations Security Council votes to endorse the ceasefire in Syria's civil war brokered by Russia and Turkey.
Permitted by the outgoing Obama administration, the resolution labelling the settlements illegal has drawn ire from conservatives around the world - including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who called it "one-sided" and "deeply unsettling" and President-elect Donald Trump, who described it as "extremely unfair".
Writing for The Spectator Australia after a recent trip to the region for the Australia-Israel-UK Leadership Dialogue, Mr Abbott said an Australian demonstration of "unswerving support for Israel, as the Middle East's only liberal, pluralist democracy, might be to join any move by the Trump administration to move its embassy to Jerusalem".
While Israel considers Jerusalem its capital, countries with diplomatic ties to the country maintain embassies in its largest city Tel Aviv, not recognising East Jerusalem's annexation by the Israelis in 1967.
As recently as December, a spokeswoman for Mr Trump said relocating the US embassy was a "very big priority". The President-elect's pick to be ambassador, David Friedman, is a staunch right-wing supporter of Israel and its activities in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Palestinians also lay claim to Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. The US embassy's relocation - a cause célèbre for Israel's fiercest American backers - would likely trigger outrage across the Muslim would.
As a significant ancient site for Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the city has long been at the centre of religious and political tensions in the Middle East and further division over its possession would represent an obstacle to peace and Palestinian statehood.
In 1995, US Congress voted to move the embassy but successive presidents have delayed the relocation every six months using a waiver provision.
"Australia should cut our $40 million a year in aid to the Palestinian Authority while it keeps paying pensions to terrorists and their families," Mr Abbott wrote, referring to support payments made to Arab detainees in Israeli prisons and their relatives.
He also said "there should be a permanent settlement for a Palestinian state where Jews have the same rights as Palestinians have in Israel", labelling the alternative a "kind of apartheid that's at odds with Israel's own values".
Mr Abbott expressed scepticism that the Palestinian Authority accepted Israel's right to exist, given the virulent and anti-Semitic rhetoric of some Palestinians.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop defended the aid program, saying there was "robust risk management and due diligence assessment processes" and a "zero tolerance policy" for fraud and corruption.
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton also backed it, telling Sydney radio station 2GB "it's not an ideal world but we provide aid in a way that is measured and controlled and if people are acting outside those parameters, then we wouldn't provide aid".
In August, the government suspended funding for World Vision after Israeli accusations that one of the charity's Palestinian employees was redirecting millions of dollars to terrorist group Hamas. World Vision has denied the allegations.
Acting Labor leader Chris Bowen said development assistance to the Palestinian territories should be "transparent and accountable" and that it is "vital to the work of countering extremism and promoting peace".
Mr Abbott is not the first Australian politician to call for the embassy move. Last year, Liberal senator James Paterson argued that "Jerusalem is Israel's capital and we should respect that by putting our embassy where they choose to have their capital."
Following the former prime minister's comments, Ms Bishop knocked the idea on the head, saying the government "does not have any plans to move the Australian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem".
SOURCE
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
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2 January, 2017
Rare realism on black crime
Angela Merkel says Islamist terrorism is Germany's biggest threat
It takes Muslims to educate you about Islam
Islamist terrorism is the biggest challenge facing Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday in a New Year's address to the nation, and vowed to introduce laws that improve security after a deadly attack before Christmas in Berlin.
Referring to the deadly truck attack in Berlin by a Tunisian asylum seeker, she said it was "sickening" when acts of terror were carried out by people who had sought protection, the BBC reported.
Twelve people are dead and at least 50 injured when a truck ploughed into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, which the White House has called an 'apparent terrorist attack'.
She described 2016 as a year of "severe tests" but said she was confident Germany could overcome them.
"As we go about our lives and our work, we are saying to the terrorists: 'You are hate-filled murderers, but you do not determine how we live and want to live. We are free, considerate and open'," Mrs Merkel said.
Merkel, seeking a fourth term as chancellor in 2017, urged Germans to shun populism and said Germany should take a leading role in addressing the many challenges facing the European Union.
"Many attach to 2016 the feeling that the world had turned upside down or that what for long had been held as an achievement is now being questioned. The European Union for example," Merkel said.
"Or equally parliamentary democracy, which allegedly is not caring for the interests of the citizens but is only serving the interests of a few. What a distortion," she said in a veiled reference to claims by the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) that is stealing votes from her conservatives.
Ahead of the 2017 election, polls put her conservative bloc well ahead of rivals but a fractured electoral landscape risks complicating the coalition arithmetic.
"Election year 2017: For Merkel, nothing is certain any more", ran a headline in Saturday's edition of mass-selling daily Bild. The paper wrote that for an increasing number of voters the chancellor, 62, no longer appeared unassailable.
Liberals across the Atlantic have hailed Merkel as an anchor of stability and reason in a year that saw Donald Trump elected as US president, Britain vote to leave the EU and US-Russia relations deteriorate to Cold War levels.
In her address, Merkel compared Brexit to a "deep incision" and said that even though the EU was "slow and arduous", its member states should focus on common interests that transcend national benefits. "And, yes, Europe should focus on what can really be better than the national state," Merkel said. "But we Germans should never be led to believe that each could have a better future by going it alone."
She was alluding again to the populist AfD, which wants Germany to leave the EU and shut its borders to asylum seekers, more than one million of whom arrived in the country this year and last.
The record number of migrants has hurt Merkel's popularity and fuelled support for the AfD, which says Islam is incompatible with the German constitution. But her conservatives are still expected to win the general election in nine months.
Merkel has made security the main election platform for her Christian Democrats (CDU).
In her speech, she said the government would introduce measures to improve security after a failed Tunisian asylum seeker drove a truck into a Christmas market in the capital on December 19, killing 12 people in the name of Islamic State.
He was shot dead by Italian police in Milan on Dec. 23 and investigators are trying to determine whether he had accomplices.
SOURCE
Africans bring some multicultural vibrancy to Bondi beach in Australia
Police arrested nine people at Sydney's Bondi Beach early on New Year's Day after the group allegedly threatened beachgoers with broken bottles.
One victim was allegedly punched in the face, and had his passport and backpack stolen in the incident, which happened around 5.30am at the southern end of the beach, according to police and media reports.
Five suspects were in custody and four others were released pending further inquiry, police said.
A number of items that were reported stolen, including mobile phones and portable speakers, were located at the beach, an NSW police spokesperson said.
Police took statements from 'a number of people' who alleged they were assaulted and robbed, the spokesperson said.
The suspects allegedly wielded a broken bottle in the robbery, according to The Daily Telegraph.
SOURCE
Ban 'mansplain' from the feminist vocabulary
I suspect that Denby Weller below has been hit -- as have so many -- by the 53% of white women who voted for The Donald. That 53% sure wounded the "sisterhood" myth. It is an utter myth, anyway. If you want to tear down some woman, get another woman onto the job. The word "bitchy" reflects that. Ms Weller writes from Australia
I had a giggle like everyone the first time I heard it. Mansplain. The perfect epithet for the boardroom bullies, the down-talking politicians, the Twits and shock jocks who embody the 16 per cent gender pay-gap, the underrepresentation of women in just about everything important. The unfairness that we're still beating our heads against the glass ceiling so many decades after The Female Eunuch.
Like thousands of women, I threw it around like the glorious little explosion of wit that it is. And most of my male friends laughed along, if a little uncomfortably.
Why 'mansplaining' should be banned
It's one of 2016's hottest buzzwords. But is calling someone a "mansplainer" fair game?
But then I started getting this sinking feeling, the kind you got when your nine-year-old self (the one with short hair and a Sarah Connor figurine) won an argument with your brother about who got to sit in the front seat of the car, but you did it by kicking him in the shins and yelling "shotgun!" while he howled in pain. Somehow, the rosy glow of that hallowed front seat was tarnished by the knowledge that you went real low to get there.
When I called someone a mansplainer, I'd hit below the belt.
Feminists, this is our hour. These are the dark days. The world needs us, and it needs us to be smart, effective and bold.
What it doesn't need is for us to be allured by our cleverness into abandoning the rules of good argument. And this is why I'm calling for a moratorium on the word "mansplain" and its cousins, "manterrupt" and "bropropriate".
It's not just because we're tarring half the population with the same brush when we slap the word "man" in front of any verb and say it with a derisive tone. Nor is it because we risk offence. It's because this adversarial form of communication ain't working, and we need to try a different tactic. And I don't mean to sound hysterical, but the future of the world kinda depends on it.
This year hasn't been a good one for progressive, liberally minded types like us and, while the reasons are too complex to tackle in a single article, there is one I can home in on without trying very hard at all.
We're not winning enough friends or influencing enough people. It's not because our arguments don't hold water, or our position is doomed to fail, it's because people can't get past the note of intellectually superior nastiness that's oozing from our pores when we utter words like "mansplain".
If feminism is, as the T-shirt says, the "radical notion that women are people", then maybe it's time we adopted the radical notion that people are people too. Even man people. Who knows, if we use our linguistic power to sever the bullies and braggarts from the general male population, we might find the rest of mankind more receptive to our plight. Or maybe not. But at least then we'd be able to dance around the moral high ground in our pantsuits and whatever the hell undies we choose to wear, or not to wear.
We love reading about how everyone hates Hillary because she's a woman, and chortle when Tanya Plibersek calls Turnbull a mansplainer, but consider that at least some of Hillary's haters were made the day she called them a basket of deplorables. And that referring to a rare conservative politician who's happy to call himself a feminist as a mansplainer is a good way to wither the last tiny vestiges of goodwill between our kind and the people with whom we most need to engage.
By all means, challenge the men who talk down to you. Go get 'em, sister. But make your primary weapon logic, not scorn. Put that superior intellect to work on the vocab that precisely describes what's wrong with their behaviour, not the generalist sexism of a gendered slur. In case you forgot, gendered slurs are the kinds of things we feminists are supposed to hate.
Do your challenging without humiliating the other blokes in the room, who might even agree with you, if you could only couch your complaint in terms that don't demean them, too.
The thing about feminism is, it ain't over yet. We don't get to walk the low road just because we're not making progress as fast as we'd like. If you want people to change, you have to speak a language they can bear to listen to before you have any hope at all of them hearing a single word you say.
Let's banish mansplaining and start talking about the real battle for feminists.
SOURCE
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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.
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