Reader’s links June 16, 2017

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Thank you all for those that take the effort to assist this site in keeping the public informed. Below, typically people can find the latest enemy propaganda, news items of related materials from multiple countries and languages, op-eds from many excellent sites who write on our topics, geopolitics and immigration issues and so on.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

95 Replies to “Reader’s links June 16, 2017”

  1. TOKYO — Seven crew members are missing and one injured after a U.S. Navy destroyer collided early Saturday morning with a merchant ship off the coast of Japan, the country’s coast guard reported.

    Footage from the Japanese TV network NHK showed heavy damage to the mid-right side of the Navy ship and a person in a stretcher being lifted to a helicopter.

    https://www.reddit.com/new/

  2. 700 ISIS militants killed in Nangarhar province in past 3 months: Gen. Waziri (khaama, Jun 16, 2017)
    http://www.khaama.com/700-isis-militants-killed-in-nangarhar-province-in-past-3-months-gen-waziri-02955

    “At least 700 militants affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist group were killed in the past three months in eastern Nangarhar province of Afghanistan, the commander of the 201st Silab Corps of the Afghan National Army General Mohammad Zaman Waziri said Thursday.

    Gen. Waziri made the remarks during a visit to Chaparhar district on Thursday which the local officials are saying has been fully cleared of the ISIS militants.

    He said the ISIS militants have suffered heavy casualties in the past two years and around 700 militants of the terror group were killed only in the past three months during the Hamza operations.

    According to Gen. Waziri, the ISIS militants had launched a psychological war in Chaparhar and Pacher Agam districts in a bid to keep the security personnel but he emphasized that all the attempts by the terror group have been foiled and they have been hardly hit during the operations.

    Gen. Waziri further added that the Afghan security forces launched a join operation in Chaparhar district on Wednesday and as a result the areas where the ISIS militants were active have been cleared.

    He also added that the security check posts will be established in the areas cleared of ISIS militants in order to prevent their return.

    The commander of the 201st Silab Corps also added that the ISIS militants are being trained on the other side of the Durand Line and are deployed to Nangarhar for the insurgency activities.

    Gen. Waziri said the ISIS militants managed to flee area after the operations were launched and one of them has been arrested, two were killed, and four others were wounded in the past 24 hours.”

  3. Child migrants risk lives to reach Europe from… Spain (gulfnews, Jun 16, 2017)
    http://gulfnews.com/news/europe/spain/child-migrants-risk-lives-to-reach-europe-from-spain-1.2044811

    “It is midnight and nine-year-old Wahib hides near the port of Melilla, a tiny Spanish territory on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast.

    Like scores of other street children here, he is prepared to risk everything to reach mainland Europe.

    “No entry, danger of falling,” reads a sign on a fence blocking access to the port.

    But the fence is scaled every night by boys doing the “risky”, as they call their dangerous game of hide-and-seek with security forces and guard dogs.

    “It means sneaking onto a boat without being seen, without being detected by heartbeat sensors or sniffed out by dogs,” explains Sara Olcina, a volunteer for the Harraga association that tries to help the minors.

    Wahib is one of 50 to 100 foreign minors, mainly from Morocco, who sleep on the streets of Melilla after sneaking into the Spanish city with hopes of getting onto a boat, according to a recent report by Madrid’s Comillas Pontifical University.

    Living in caves, filth

    But the road to Europe is treacherous and the youths’ game of hide-and-seek takes many forms.
    Some climb over the fence and descend into the port with a rope. Others cling to the undercarriage of trucks waiting to board ferries for mainland Spain.

    Attempts to cross the Mediterranean also include hiding among cargo and clambering onto ferries with the aid of mooring ropes.

    There are no estimates of how many youngsters actually make it illegally from Melilla into mainland Europe.

    Wahib fell in his last failed bid and sports a badly-healed wound on the back of his head.

    The “risky” caused at least four deaths in 2015 and 2016 in Melilla, according to local media, including two Moroccan minors who drowned as they tried to approach a boat.

    Olcina remembers a group of children who lived in the streets last year.

    “The youngest was seven, the eldest 10,” she says.

    “Many boarded boats illegally.”

    Some children live in difficult-to-access caves facing the Mediterranean which they reach by making a perilous climb, sleeping on flattened cardboard boxes.

    Others spend their nights in filthy hiding places under bridges or on public benches.

    Many of the youngsters sniff glue to get high, making it easier to take their “risky” activities as a game.

    Bilal, 14, has a cheerful face and wears a filthy sweatshirt decorated with a rabbit.
    He has already made “three attempts this week.”

    His older brother, he says, made it across to mainland Spain. Originally from the Moroccan city of Fez, he arrived in Melilla, an 80,000-strong city, in January.

    But he spent just “four days” at a reception centre for minors before he escaped. Nearby, one of his friends is covered in grease from a truck after a failed “risky” attempt, a desperate expression in his eyes.

    “We can’t understand how the government of a country like Spain can allow this,” says Jose Palazon, the president of local migrant rights group, Prodein.

    He notes the “distress of these children, who are victims of groups that control people on the streets, who sell them glue, who make them beg or steal.”

    Melilla and its sister city Ceuta, located some 400 kilometres further northwest along the coast, have been under Spanish control since the 15th century but are claimed by Morocco.

    The only two land borders between Africa and the European Union, they have become infamous for the fortified fences that separate them from Morocco, which migrants routinely try to climb over.

    Some of the children say it is fairly easy to enter Melilla by hiding among the crush of Moroccans who work as porters transporting goods across the border every day. Once on Spanish land, they are taken to youth reception centres.

    The number of unaccompanied foreign minors arriving in the city has soared over the past two years, overcrowding the centres, says Daniel Ventura, a government official in charge of social protection.

    The centres house close to 500 minors whom they are tasked to feed, clothe and educate.
    ‘Try again’

    Most are enrolled in school or work training programmes, according to Ventura. But the bulk of the minors live in a centre set up in a rundown former military fort, which the media is not allowed to visit.

    By law, minors cannot be sent back to their country. And when they reach 18, they are entitled to Spanish nationality if they have been in a centre for at least two years.

    But associations say that children flee the centres because they lose confidence in the system and decide to take matters into their own hands.

    “They see that Spanish authorities no longer deliver Spanish ID documents to many who reach the age of majority,” says Palazon, a claim contested by government social protection official Ventura.

    Abdelali, who says he is 17 and from Marrakech, sleeps under a bridge after he was kicked out of a reception centre for minors that concluded from a bone scan that he was 18.

    “My friend managed to get on a boat, I fell,” he says, his arm in a sling. “As soon as I get better, I will ‘do the risky’ again.””

  4. Asylum seekers who suffer hate crimes to get residency in Berlin (DW, Jun 16, 2017)
    http://www.dw.com/en/asylum-seekers-who-suffer-hate-crimes-to-get-residency-in-berlin/a-39284655

    “Rejected asylum seekers in Berlin will get residency if they can prove they are victims of right-wing hate crime, the city-state’s interior minister has said. But the federal government says the offer could be “abused.”.

    Berlin is to become the second German state to offer automatic residency to asylum seekers who become the victims of far-right hate crimes, Berlin Interior Minister Andreas Geisel told his colleagues from the other 15 German states this week in Dresden. The offer, Geisel told the interior minister conference, would also extend to their immediate families.

    The point of the legislation was not only to offer people protection and help in Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) politician said, but also to show perpetrators “that their crimes lead to nothing and cause the exact opposite of what they may have had in mind.” Hate crime, he added, was defined as any crime motivated by prejudice, whether they were xenophobic, anti-Semitic, sexist, homophobic, or Islamophobic….”

  5. Athens prepares to welcome Refugee Food Festival (ansamed, Jun 16, 2017)
    http://www.ansamed.info/ansamed/en/news/nations/greece/2017/06/16/athens-prepares-to-welcome-refugee-food-festival_fe6ca93e-0639-4887-928e-798956f27bd8.html

    “Athens is gearing up for its debut in the Refugee Food Festival which will see five of the city’s top restaurants host refugee chefs from around the world, kicking off on Sunday, June 18.

    The European-wide festival is part of the celebrations to mark World Refugee Day which is on June 20.

    And after 2 successful editions in France, this citizen-led initiative is being hosted in Athens for the first time, while also expanding all over Europe with Brussels, Amsterdam, Florence, Lyon, Madrid, Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux, Milan, Bari, and Rome all taking part, welcoming chefs from Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, and Somalia – among other nations – to over 70 restaurants.

    “This is a great celebration of diversity and a pioneering way to encourage a change in perceptions; because behind each refugee, there is a passionate man or woman with precious talents,” Sudha Nair-Iliades, publisher of Athens Insider magazine, one of the organizers behind the Athens edition of the event, told ANSAmed…”

  6. ‘Thousands’ of violent Islamists in Sweden: security police (thelocal, Jun 16, 2017)
    https://www.thelocal.se/20170616/thousands-of-violent-extremists-in-sweden-security-police

    “The number of militant extremists living in Sweden has soared from a couple of hundreds a few years ago to thousands today, the security police Säpo believes.

    “We have never seen anything like it before,” said Säpo chief Anders Thornberg in an interview with Swedish news agency TT.

    The vast majority of the extremists support violent Islamist ideologies, according to Säpo, whose security experts in a report in 2010 estimated that there were around 200 such sympathizers in Sweden.

    “We would say that it has gone from hundreds to thousands now,” said Thornberg.

    However, he stressed that the security service believes few of them have the ability to, or even intend to, carry out a terror attack in Sweden.

    The security police are working on putting together new, more exact, figures, reports TT. Thornberg described the situation as serious.

    “This is the ‘new normal’ … It is an historic challenge that extremist circles are growing,” he said.

    He attributed the rise primarily to the propaganda machine of Isis, also known as the Islamic State (IS) or Daesh, which has united different groups of Islamist extremists.

    “We used to have different circles. We had radicalized people from North Africa, the Middle East and Somalia, but they were all separate,” he said.

    Thornberg said Säpo now receives around 6,000 intelligence tips a month concerning terrorism and extremism, compared to an average 2,000 a month in 2012.

    Terror expert Magnus Ranstorp of the Swedish Defence University told The Local the new figures were expected. “Those of us working in the field of counter-terrorism are not surprised, it has been in the making for some time, it didn’t just appear. When IS declared the caliphate, that was the genie out of the bottle,” he said.

    “It is a development we’re seeing in general, of course it’s worse in bigger countries. In the UK there are 23,000 extremists, in Belgium there are 18,000, in France 17,000. Not everyone is equally dangerous, but it only takes a small number of people.”

    Ranstorp said there were four reasons behind the increase in violent extremists:

    “First, there’s the mobilization within the context of the conflict in the Middle East, in particular Syria. Then there’s social media. There has been a tsunami of carefully calibrated propaganda and recruitment – and with social media IS can reach out to anyone’s living room,” he told The Local.

    A third reason is segregation in Sweden’s so-called vulnerable areas, districts with often high poverty and crime rates and a higher prevalence of religious extremism.

    “It’s important because it has all the socio-economic problems, but also it has been easy for extremists to recruit undisturbed in those areas. And the fourth reason is maybe that the prevention measures have been pretty tame.

    It’s become better in the last year, but I have long said that if you compare Denmark and Sweden, Denmark is at university level and Sweden at kindergarten level,” said Ranstorp, calling for sharper prevention measures and emphasizing the need for police and other governmental and local authorities to work together to break segregation in vulnerable areas.

    Interior Minister Anders Ygeman called the figures “worrying”, but added: “This is above all a description of what has happened in the past few years and it is already known. We have seen an increasing in violent extremism and an increase in sympathizers too, especially together with the outbreak of the war in Syria.”

    Asked what he thought the increase in people supporting extremist ideologies said about Sweden’s work to combat radicalism, he told TT: “I think it says little. This is a development we have seen in a number of countries in Europe.

    On the other hand, it shows that it was right to take those measures we have. A permanent centre against violent extremism, that we have increased the budget to work against violent extremism, that we have increased the security police’s budget for three years.”

    Säpo has previously said that about 300 people from Sweden are known to have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join organizations such as Isis since 2012.

    Jihadist or sympathizers from Sweden have been linked to several terrorist attacks in recent years.

    On April 7th, an Uzbek national who had shown sympathies for jihadist groups including Isis used a stolen truck to mow down pedestrians on a busy shopping street in Stockholm, killing five people and injuring 15.

    And a Swedish national, Osama Krayem, has been charged with terrorist murders over the 2016 Brussels metro bombing.”

  7. Iran Boat and US Helicopter Exchange Warning “Shots”

    By Martin Lioll

    A U.S. Marine helicopter was targeted with a laser by an Iranian missile boat in the Persian Gulf the week, triggering an automatic response from the aircraft, which fired flares back at the ship.

    The incident took place Tuesday, when a group of two Navy warships and a cargo ship were moving out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, Fox News reported Thursday. During the encounter, the Iranian warship came within 800 yards of the American ships, a situation that Cmdr. Bill Urban called “unsafe and unprofessional.”

    “The amphibious assault ship USS Bataan (LHD 5), guided-missile destroyer USS Cole (DDG 67) and dry cargo ship USNS Washington Chambers (T-AKE-11) were transiting the strait when the Iranian vessel paralleled the U.S. formation, shining a spotlight on Cole,” Urban wrote in a statement, according to the Washington Examiner.

    http://conservativetribune.com/alert-iran-and-us/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=braverapoliticaloutcast&utm_campaign=can&utm_content=2017-06-16

    http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/navy-says-iranian-ship-shined-laser-at-us-helicopter-flying-over-international-waters/article/2626038

    Richard: Iran is trying to draw attenion away from NORK so Kim (under Chinese orders) can do something to provoke the US. The enemies of freedom of know how much Obama weakened the US military and are taking advantage of of this weakness to push two military crisis’s at the same time. We have been in this situation before (WWII) but at that time we didn’t have one of the political parties trying to stage a coup against the President.

  8. GOP Congressmen Want Concealed Carry Reciprocity for All in DC After Baseball Shootings

    (Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) After the shooting at the GOP baseball practice on Wednesday in Alexandria, Va., members of Congress are calling for less restrictive gun laws in the District of Columbia.

    Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) had introduced the D.C. Personal Protection Reciprocity Act on May 15, which would permit individuals with a concealed carry license from their home state to carry a firearm in D.C.

    Virginia allows individuals to open carry at 18 without a permit and concealed carry at 21 with a permit, but D.C.’s tighter gun-control laws make it nearly impossible to carry within the District limits.

    “After the horrific shooting at the Republican Congressional Baseball practice, there will likely be calls for special privileges to protect politicians,” Massie said. “Our reaction should instead be to protect the right of all citizens guaranteed in the Constitution: the right to self-defense. I do not want to extend a special privilege to politicians, because the right to keep and bear arms is not a privilege, it is a God-given right protected by our Constitution.”

    http://www.libertyheadlines.com/gop-congressmen-want-concealed-carry-reciprocity-dc-baseball-shootings/?AID=7236