Free Republic

Core EU powers France and Germany vowed Monday to accelerate eurozone integration, with a new bilateral panel to work out ways to kickstart the reform process. “We’ve been talking about progress in eurozone integration for years, but things are not moving fast enough,” said France’s new Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire in Berlin after talks with his German counterpart Wolfgang Schäuble. “We have now decided to get things going more quickly and further in a very concrete manner,” he said. Schäuble agreed that “we are convinced that Germany and France must take a leading role” in strengthening the European Union...

The EU foreign policy chief says Europe does “not see eye to eye” with the Trump administration on major issues such as trade, climate change and funding of U.N. agencies, but can “easily” work with the U.S. on Syria and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Federica Mogherini spoke Saturday during a regional gathering of the World Economic Forum. Mogherini warned that threatened U.S. cuts in funding U.N. agencies “would create a major security issue worldwide, including in Europe.” …

Laws in some European countries that impede migrant children from reuniting with their families or force them to leave when they turn 18 create a “huge security risk” by potentially turning young people to crime and extremism, the chief of Europe’s top human rights body said Friday. Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjorn Jagland said such laws compel many young migrants facing uncertain futures to flee, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation from human traffickers who could push them into crime or the illicit sex trade. “This is causing a huge security risk for Europe,” Jagland said during an interview with...

Altena, a town in western Germany, was on Wednesday honored by Chancellor Angela Merkel for its achievements in integrating refugees. It was the first place to win the National Integration Prize, and received €10,000 for its efforts. The North Rhine-Westphalian town set up a program which aimed to successfully integrate every refugee that was sent there. The program, called “From refugee to Altena co-citizen”, ensured that every refugee family which arrived in the town of 17,300 people was given a “mentor” who helped them settle in, according to n-tv. The new arrivals were also given an apartment within a community...

Spanish authorities have arrested a Muslim cleric — whom the New York Times once praised for his efforts to fight radicalization within Germany’s Islamic community — for alleged ties to the Islamic State. Hesham Shashaa (aka Abu Adam), a 46-year-old Egyptian-Palestinian, was detained near Alicante in southeastern Spain on April 26 on charges of aiding the Islamic State, extolling terrorism and promoting Salafi-jihadism. The Spanish Interior Ministry said that Shashaa had facilitated the travel to Spain of Islamic State jihadists from Syria and Iraq by providing them with money, refuge and fake documents. Most recently, Shashaa had made arrangements for...

Authorities in Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany, have begun confiscating private dwellings to ease a housing shortage — one that has been acutely exacerbated by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow more than two million migrants into the country in recent years. City officials have been seizing commercial properties and converting them into migrant shelters since late 2015, when Merkel opened German borders to hundreds of thousands of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Now, however, the city is expropriating residential property units owned by private citizens. In an unprecedented move, Hamburg authorities recently confiscated six residential...

If you believe in nations and nationality, then Globalists see you as a direct threat to what they have planned for the future. Your refusal to consider yourself a Global Citizen is a hindrance to their plans, your failure to vote for their selected candidates is causing them more problems than they expected. Alliances are built to further common goals, and the Globalists have allied themselves to Radical Islamists because you and people like you are refusing to toe the line. To many, it seems as though the mass forced immigration of migrants from Muslim majority countries is being done...

A investigation by news service Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) carried out in Berlin’s refugee camps has found that women in the camps face “grossly inadequate protection from sexual and gender-based violence.” Dozens of the women that IRIN spoke to reported facing sexual harassment while living at Berlin shelters, and many said that they were offered very little support, and lived in constant fear of attack. […] Sally Abazeed, a 20-year-old refugee from Damascus, told IRIN how she had been repeatedly pestered by one guard at the camp, who tried to kiss her and always asked for her phone number....

Emmanuel Macron has beaten Marine Le Pen in Sunday's French election and taken more than 60 per cent of the vote, according to several early exit polls. Polling conducted by Ipsos, Ifop and BVA all gave Mr Macron, the pro-business candidate, a strong lead over Front National leader Marine Le Pen.

Recently, an Afghan woman who converted to Christianity was murdered. More and more refugees in Germany are being targeted for turning away from Islam. Are these only isolated cases? The mother of four was only 38 years old and had been living in Germany since 2011. The former Muslim woman had converted to Christianity and was involved in a project to help refugees run by her community church in Prien am Chiemsee in Bavaria. None of her friends had ever thought it possible that the woman would be stabbed by a 29-year-old refugee, also from Afghanistan, on the street in...

Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) is planning to build homes in Morocco as places to deport underage unaccompanied migrants who have broken the law, or who want to return voluntarily. A BAMF document leaked to the TAZ newspaper shows that two homes have been planned for now, each with 100 places, at a cost of €960,000 ($1,050,000) per year. The orphanages would include medical facilities, as well as some sort of schooling and vocational training, the plans said, and would also be available to local homeless children and young people. […] The homes are supposed to “create...

Sweden and Germany are funding two orphanages in Morocco in the hope of easing the problem of homeless Moroccan ‘street children’, many of whom have joined criminal gangs. “Now in its first stage, this is a pilot project which will provide a total of 200 beds. The idea is that in future, we will build more of these centres [in Morocco]”, Swedish Interior Minister Anders Ygeman told Dagens Nyheter. The first orphanages are expected to be ready in the Spring, and will provide access to medical and psychiatric care along with education and training for jobs. Staff, who will be...

The bill for Britain’s Brexit divorce settlement is growing ever longer, with leaders in Brussels now saying that Britain should continue to pick up a portion of the tab for migrants living in Turkey beyond accession. Initial demands that Britain should pay into the European Union’s seven-year Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) until it expires at the end of 2020 – a year after Brexit – have since expanded to include references to “issues resulting from” the budget, as well as those related to the European Investment Bank (EIB) and European Development Fund (EDF). German representatives are now suggesting that “issues”...

European Union leaders meeting Saturday to approve the guidelines that will drive divorce negotiations with Britain will also assess wording which would allow a united Ireland — including Northern Ireland — to become part of the bloc at a potential future date. Two European officials said that the issue was likely to be added to the minutes of the summit, which will be held without British Prime Minister Theresa May. The officials asked not to be identified because the summit of 27 EU leaders still was being prepared. …

A Swedish woman has explained her shock at being told during a job interview with Scandinavian airline SAS that she would have to take off her headscarf if she wanted the position. Aye Alhassani, 23, had completed several tests and a group interview before she was invited to an individual interview for the position with the airline. It was during the interview that she was informed SAS has a uniform policy banning the wearing of religious symbols. “At first they were cautious, and I don’t think the interviewer wanted to be straight about it. But eventually, it was clarified that...

A huge fire, apparently started deliberately, tore through the Grande-Synthe migrant camp near the northern French city of Dunkirk late Monday, reducing it to “a heap of ashes”, the regional chief said. Firefighters said at least 10 people had been injured in the blaze at the camp, which was home to some 1,500 people, mostly Iraqi Kurds, living in closely packed wooden huts. “There is nothing left but a heap of ashes,” Michel Lalande, prefect of France’s Nord region, told reporters at the scene as firefighters continued to battle the flames which were visible from several kilometers away. “It will...

The Leftist-Liberal demographic engineering project of the European Union violates the rights of indigenous European peoples, goes against global trends towards the territorial partition of ethnic groups, and contradicts expert research on conditions that create ethnic and political conflict. The continuous practice of settling large numbers of non-Europeans into regions already inhabited by European indigenous populations but who have very low fertility rates inevitably alters the ethnic compositions of European nation-states, renders Europeans demographic minorities in their own homelands, affects the distribution of political power and the relations between ethnic groups, and causes a variety of other conflicts and problems,...

In a rare interview, Red Bull boss and Austria’s richest man Dietrich Mateschitz has slammed mass migration and political correctness, warning they threaten to destroy Europe’s true cultural diversity. Speaking to Kleine Zeitung, the Formula 1 investor called the decision of key politicians to open the borders — which resulted in Europe’s migration crisis — “unpardonable”, noting that “if a company were to make mistakes on the same scale, it would have gone broke”. Highlighting the “hypocrisies” of what he called the “refugees welcome brigade” with regards to migration, Mateschitz said: “I am talking about the fact that none of...

The Daily Mail reported: A refugee from Ghana has been arrested for dragging a young woman from her tent and raping her while she was on a camping holiday with her boyfriend. The young couple were on a camping trip in the Siegaue Nature Reserve, north of the former German capital of Bonn, when they were approached by a machete-wielding man at about 12.30am on Sunday last week. The boyfriend was forced to watch as the attacker violated his 23-year-old lover. The boyfriend, 26, who had also been threatened by the man, contacted police and medical responders took her to...

STOCKHOLM — Swedish police said Saturday that they believe they have captured the man accused of turning a beer truck into a weapon a day earlier by driving it into a crowd of pedestrians in a rampage that left four people dead. Authorities did not divulge the man’s name but said he is a 39-year-old from Uzbekistan who had been known to security services as “a marginal character” for the past year. Police said that when they first investigated him, they had found no connections to extremism. Authorities did not say when the man had come to Sweden. The arrest...