Free Republic

It sounds at first like a crazy thought experiment: One morning, every resident of the eurozone comes home to find a check in their mailbox worth over €500 ($597) and possibly as much as €3,000. A gift, just like that, sent by the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt. The scenario is less absurd than it may sound. Indeed, many serious academics and financial experts are demanding exactly that. They want ECB chief Mario Draghi to fire up the printing presses and hand out money directly to the people. The logic behind the idea is that recipients of the money...

A survey on Thursday shows that Muslims in Germany feel they are integrating—but a growing majority of Germans feel threatened by Islam in the country. The survey was carried out in November—before the massacre of journalists in Paris by Islamist gunmen—but as the numbers attending anti-Muslim rallies in Dresden and other cities began to escalate. The Bertelsman Foundation think tank survey looked at the perception of Islam in Germany from the eyes of Muslims and non-Muslims. Of the non-Muslims surveyed, 57 percent thought that Islam was threatening or very threatening to German society. …

Reuters) - Billionaire financier George Soros has urged the West to step up aid to Ukraine, outlining steps towards a $50 billion (33.22 billion pounds) financing package that he said should be viewed as a bulwark against an increasingly aggressive Russia.Writing in the New York Review of Books, Soros said Europe and the United States needed to balance sanctions imposed on Russia with large-scale assistance to near-bankrupt Ukraine, which risks defaulting on debt as a result of turmoil caused by pro-Russia separatist fighting.

PEGIDA appeared out of nowhere in October and now draws thousands to its protests. Lucian Kim reports for BuzzFeed News from Dresden on the rise of the shadowy new group. DRESDEN, Germany — The thousands who tramped to a soggy field in a Dresden park Monday night weren’t just defying the rain and cold, but the words of Chancellor Angela Merkel. In a televised address on New Year’s Eve, Merkel warned citizens not to attend any more protests organized by PEGIDA, a shadowy group claiming to defend Western civilization against “Islamization.” That night, 18,000 protesters, mostly young men, showed up...

In the wake of the terrorist attack on the offices of French satirist paper Charlie Hebdo, one Muslim cleric justified the murders under Islamic law. ... Choudary’s entire argument excusing the Paris attack reveals the fundamental disconnect between views of civilizations. Radical Islamists have no intention of assimilating into their respective cultures or contributing to any kind of meaningful dialogue about religion and free speech. They are intent on terrorizing western citizens out of exerting their rights. Their plan of terrorism and intimidation, with the ultimate goal of imposing their religion on others is fundamentally anti-American and is not meant...

Anti-immigrant groups in Germany seized on Wednesday's deadly attack in Paris, with leaders of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and PEGIDA saying it showed the threat of Islamist violence. Twelve people were killed when gunmen stormed the offices of a French satirical magazine known for lampooning radical Islam. "This bloodbath proves wrong those who laughed or ignored the fears of so many people about a looming danger of Islamism," said Alexander Gauland, a regional AfD leader. "This gives new clout to PEGIDA demands." PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, itself reacted strongly to the Paris...

School closures ordered by the Islamic State militant group have resulted in an estimated 670,000 children in Syria being deprived of an education ... The Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot that has seized territory in Syria and Iraq, began shutting schools in areas in eastern Syria in November. The closures were ordered pending a religious revision of the curriculum. ... Between 1.3 million and 1.6 million Syrian children have been prevented from attending school as a result of the now five-year civil war, which has killed more than 200,000 and displaced half the country’s population ... In September, students...

Inflation in Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, slowed to just 0.2 percent in December, its lowest level in more than five years, and averaged 0.9 percent for the whole of 2014, according to new figures released on Monday. […] Using the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP)—the yardstick used by the European Central Bank—inflation in Germany was even lower at 0.1 percent in December, way under the ECB’s annual inflation target of just below 2.0 percent. The chronically low level of inflation across the single currency bloc has fueled concern the region could slip into deflation—a sustained and widespread drop in...

Supporters and opponents of a group campaigning against what it sees as the "Islamisation" of Europe are holding rival rallies across Germany. There have been weekly protests by the Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West (Pegida) since October. A record 18,000 people turned out on Monday at one rally in Dresden. But counter demonstrations have sprung up and the group has been condemned by senior German politicians. Thousands of people are marching in Berlin, Cologne, Dresden and Stuttgart. In Berlin, police said that some 5,000 counter-demonstrators blocked hundreds of Pegida supporters from marching along their planned route. A...

It did not take long. The game is very much in play. Greek voters are being bombarded with warnings about what is at stake when they go to the polls on 25 January. There is little that is coded in these messages. When a country has been bailed out to the tune of €240bn (£187bn; $286bn) there is no such thing as non-interference in Greece's internal politics. Most of the European political establishment does not want Greece to elect the radical left party Syriza led by Alexis Tsipras. The party is currently narrowly ahead in the polls. Mr Tsipras is...

BERLIN (AP) — Berlin police are investigating an attack on an Israeli citizen who was beaten by a group of young men after he asked them to stop singing anti-Semitic songs on the subway in the German capital on New Year’s Eve. Police spokesman Martin Dahms said Monday that police have not yet been able to identify the attackers, but are evaluating video footage of the incident. The victim, 26-year-old Shahak Shapira, who lives in Berlin, told The Associated Press that after he asked the seven men to stop chanting anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli songs and slurs, he recorded them on...

Frankfurt (AFP) - Tougher sanctions may destabilise the situation further in Russia and plunge the country into chaos, German deputy chancellor Sigmar Gabriel warned in a newspaper interview on Sunday. "The goal was never to push Russia politically and economically into chaos," Gabriel told the Bild am Sonntag. "Whoever wants that will provoke a much more dangerous situation for all of us in Europe," he said, pointing out that Russia was a nuclear power. The aim of the sanctions imposed against Russia so far was to steer the country back to the negotiating table. "Those who want to destabilise Russia...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is prepared to let Greece leave the eurozone if Greeks elect a government that jettisons the country’s current austerity course, according to German media reports. The report in the Der Spiegel daily, which cited sources close to the German government, comes as polls show a radical leftist party leading the field three weeks ahead of a snap election in Greece. The Syriza party of Alexis Tsipras has pledged to reverse reforms imposed by Greece’s international creditors and renegotiate its bailout deal. …

The two “ghost ships” discovered sailing towards the Italian coast last week with hundreds of migrants – but no crew – on board are just the latest symptom of what experts consider to be the world’s largest wave of mass-migration since the end of the second world war. Wars in Syria, Libya and Iraq, severe repression in Eritrea, and spiralling instability across much of the Arab world have all contributed to the displacement of around 16.7 million refugees worldwide. A further 33.3 million people are “internally displaced” within their own war-torn countries, forcing many of those originally from the Middle...

[snip] Pegida participants feel buoyed by the fact they are part of a growing movement across Europe of voters who feel that mainstream politicians are far too lenient on immigration. At a typical Pegida rally, supporters talk of their anger that Germany is being overrun by Muslim immigrants; they say many are criminals who need to be deported immediately and they call for an obligatory integration programme. Banner slogans read: “We want our homeland back” and “Send the criminal asylum seekers packing”. Fears among chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative alliance were already rife that it is losing considerable support to the...

Hundreds of German companies active in Russia are suspending or will cancel projects due to international sanctions over Ukraine and the weakened rouble. Thirty-six percent of 200 firms polled in December by the German-Russian Chamber of Commerce expected to cancel projects due to the situation in Russia. And 58 percent said they had been hurt by the sanctions, which began in March after Moscow's annexation of Crimea and grew in response to Moscow's support for pro-Russia rebels in eastern Ukraine. The biggest reverse shift so far for German business in Russia came last week when chemical giant BASF cancelled a...

The Pegida movement calls the media “Lügepresse” (lying press), because it does not depict the consequences and dangers of Islamic mass-immigration properly. The below incidence, where an undercover journalists is interviewed by other journalists, and uses the interview to depict the Pegida movement as half-racist, confirms Pegida’s concern about the media’s honesty. The undercover journalist used to work at the interviewing journalists’ station, NDR, before he switched to RTL – meaning that he might know (and may even have colluded with) the interviewers who interview the fake “demonstrator”. 29 percent of Germans find the demonstrations “justified because of the degree...

Anyone close up regarding the PEGIDA movement in Germany? German citizens taking a stand against the insane immigration policies/ Islamization of their country sounds right to me. From here, it sounds like the powers-that-be are demonizing it - reminds me of what they said about the Tea Party. Curious to have some feedback from those closer in. Thanks.

...Merkel, the German chancellor, has used her New Year’s Eve address to launch a scathing attack on the country’s growing anti-Muslim protests, calling its leaders racists who are driven by hatred. In a televised message due to be broadcast tonight, Mrs Merkel urged Germans to turn their backs on demonstrations that have seen up to 17,000 people gather each Monday in the eastern city of Dresden to protest against the “Islamisation of the West”. Speaking to those considering joining the protests, she said: “Do not follow those who have called the rallies. Because all too often they have prejudice, coldness,...

Britain remains the world's leading recruiting ground for al-Qaeda. ... British school teachers are afraid to teach their students about Christianity out of fear of offending Muslims. — Roger Bolton, BBC Radio 4's Feedback program. Rather than taking steps to protect British children, police, social workers, teachers... and the media deliberately played down the severity of the crimes [of Muslim sexual grooming gangs] in order to avoid being accused of "Islamophobia" or racism. — From the report "Easy Meat: Multiculturalism, Islam and Child Sex Slavery." ... The problem of honor-based violence and forced marriages in England is "worse than people...