An illegal migrant from Senegal who is suspected of raping a nurse at a bus stop in Naples has been arrested by Italian authorities.

The brutal attack, which took place in the middle of the day as the nurse waited to go home after finishing a shift at the hospital, lasted nearly 45 minutes, Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports.

The 48-year-old victim said that she was waiting at the deserted Corso Arnaldo Lucci Metropark bus station, behind the Naples’ main train station at about 3pm, when the Senegalese migrant jumped over a fence and came running towards her.

Thinking she was about to be robbed, the nurse said that she had offered the African migrant her purse but quickly realized that money was not what he had intended to take from her. The attacker then proceeded to throw her to the ground and covered her mouth while she attempted wrestle herself away from his grip.

“He would put his hands everywhere and get angry because I was defending myself,” the nurse said, adding that “He keep repeating: ‘Let me do what I want or I’ll kill you. Stand still and don’t scream.’”

“He was double my size and all his weight was on my back. He got angry because my jeans were too tight and he couldn’t take them off.”

Despite the victim telling the attacker that she was pregnant, couldn’t breathe, and needed water, he continued choking her while having his way with her. The horrifying, 45 minute-long ordeal finally came to an end when the nurse’s bus finally showed up and security forces arrived on scene.

“They use drones to find people who go to the beach despite the Covid emergency. Why don’t they use them to prevent these and other attacks?” the nurse said.

When asked how her life has been since the attack, the 47-year-old victim said: “Bad. I didn’t go back to work, I have to live with the pain of my daughter who feels hurt as a woman and as my daughter. And that of my husband who feels guilty and helpless for not being able to protect me. They are traumas that overwhelm all the family. But the thing that hurts me most is the fear that I had of death and that now prevents me from smiling.”

voiceofeurope.com/2020/05/italy-senegalese-migrant-arrested-for-raping-italian-nurse-in-the-broad-daylight/

While the chairman of the Islamic Religious Community of Austria (IGGÖ), Ümit Vural, uses social networks primarily to collect donations for his mosques, his religion teachers quite unabashedly spread their real ideas to the public.

Selçuk Ö., an Islamic religion teacher appointed by IGGÖ, posts his views on the Internet without any timidity:In addition to the hateful comments against the alleged “Nazi Austria” and the fear that Muslims “are the next ones to die in Hitler’s gas chambers and end up as soap”, there are a lot of anti-Semitic postings on the page of the self-proclaimed “dialogue appointee”.Selçuk Ö. took the cake ten years ago with a cartoon in which a man with a crooked nose, Star of David and sidelocks rubs his hands in front of a smoking gas chamber, apparently full of Palestinians.The teacher comments below: “The Gaz(a) Chamber continues its incessant work, a fascinating caricature!”

Even during the attempted coup d’état in Turkey Selçuk Ö. leaves no doubt about his convictions: Under a call to restrict the opposition’s freedom of expression and to expel all those involved, the declared Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) voter demands to go one step further and “let the traitors hang”. It is also particularly embarrassing that all this is happening in front of dozens of IGGÖ officials: In addition to several IGGÖ school inspectors, several teachers of Islam who teach at Austria’s public schools, as well as his head, the IGGÖ chairman Ümit Vural himself, can be found in his Facebook friends list.

Ö.s Facebook account also brings together the local Islam celebrities: Besides “racism expert” Sonia Zaafrani, politicians such as Hakan Gördü, Turgay Taskiran and SPÖ councillor Omar Al-Rawi are among the Facebook friends of the Turk, who are otherwise particularly sensitive to possible discrimination when it is voiced by Europeans.

Maximilian Weinzierl, deputy chairman of the ” Free Students Vienna”, demands the resignation of IGGÖ boss Vural:

If it is true that such posts have been posted for years with the knowledge of half of the IGGÖ officials, anything but a resignation of those responsible is out of the question. Furthermore, until the actual circumstances are clarified, the Ministry of Education should be responsible for the teaching of Islam and the appointment of teachers.

Unzensuriert.at inquired at the IGGÖ and wanted to know whether the teacher’s Facebook postings glorifying violence were known and whether something would be done about it. We have not received an answer so far.

The question that remains:

For years, a teacher at an Austrian school, financed by the Austrian taxpayer, posted articles that were subject to criminal law. And no one cares: not the mainstream media, which otherwise brand every slightest expression of displeasure by a native as a hate crime, not the honorary and full-time racism and extremism “experts”, not the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter-Terrorism. All these unsavory postings were noticed by dozens of IGGÖ officials. There too: no reply. Which is why it must be assumed that at least a certain sympathy for the statements could be there. Which leads to the question to what extent the religious community is suitable to continue to appoint the teaching staff at Austrian schools.

unzensuriert.at

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently described Sweden as a “model” for battling the coronavirus. “I think if we are to reach a new normal, I think in many ways Sweden represents a future model of — if we wish to get back to a society in which we don’t have lockdowns,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Emergencies Program, said. “They’ve been doing the testing, they’ve ramped up their capacity to do intensive care quite significantly,” he added.

“And their health system has always remained within its capacity to respond to the number of cases that they’ve been experiencing… Sweden has put in place a very strong public policy around social distancing, around caring and protecting for people in long term care facilities and many other things,”.

“What it has done differently” he added, “is it has very much relied on its relationship with its citizenry and the ability and willingness of citizens to implement physical distancing and to self-regulate.”

As noted by Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at the Swedish Lund University:

“The Swedish approach to COVID-19 could not be more different from its neighbours’, placing much of the responsibility for delaying the spread of the virus and protecting the vulnerable in the hands of the public… Swedish bars, restaurants and schools remain open. Under the blue skies and blazing sun Sweden has enjoyed lately, people have flocked to parks and beaches, bars and cafes. Nevertheless, Sweden has a high number of people living in single households, and citizens are generally respectful of public health advice and guidelines”.

Is Sweden, however, really a “model” to the rest of the world? Several of Dr. Ryan’s assumptions seem to be, at the very least, questionable.

As of May 6, Sweden, which has a population of 10.18 million people, had 2,854 deaths, which corresponds to 280.27 deaths per million people. In comparison, the other countries of the Nordic region, Denmark, Norway and Finland, which all went on lockdown, had 503, 215 and 246 deaths respectively, corresponding to 86.76, 40.46 and 44.58 deaths per million people, respectively.

Besides refusing to close down businesses, restaurants and schools, Sweden also has refused to close its borders, even to travelers from countries with large and uncontrollable outbreaks, such as Iran.

“Historically, it has not been a great idea to stop flights. The latest example is probably Italy. There they canceled all flights to China, but they still got a big outbreak,” said state epidemiologist and bureaucrat Anders Tegnell in late February. Tegnell has since become the face of Sweden’s coronavirus strategy. Tegnell stressed that stopping flights from Iran would complicate helping the country with its outbreak. “If you shut down [flights from] Iran, you cannot help the country with protective materials and such,” he said.

As late as February 29, for example, 11 planes from Northern Italy and 1 plane from Iran landed in Arlanda airport in Stockholm, but no measures were taken to check people for the virus or put them in quarantine. Flights from Iran were only stopped on March 2 and as late as March 5, Tegnell criticized the Scandinavian Airline SAS for stopping all flights to Italy, a decision that he said, “lacked medical and scientific basis”. Only on March 17, when the EU made its recommendation, did Sweden stop all non-essential travel to its airports. Despite that, 40 planes have landed every day at Arlanda airport in Stockholm, where travelers have not been tested for Coronavirus upon landing or asked to go into quarantine.

In late February, Minister of Social Affairs, Lena Hallengreen, said that she believed that Sweden’s readiness for the pandemic was “good”. Two months later, she told Aftonbladet that the strategy had been “a failure” with regard to the most vulnerable population group, the elderly. On May 5, the Sweden Democrats called for a special debate to be held in parliament regarding the deaths during the corona crisis in Sweden’s nursing homes.

“Sweden has twice the death toll as our Nordic neighbors combined. One of the reasons is that the government has failed to protect the elderly,” said the party’s group leader Henrik Vinge in a press release.

“The fact that Sweden has not been able to protect vulnerable groups from infection has been identified as a failure by government officials. The development has been particularly devastating in nursing homes in the Stockholm region, which first suffered from widespread infection… 123 [nursing homes] out of 227 in the region had already been infected… by Easter weekend, according to a new survey. The fact that Sweden, unlike other countries, has had too limited testing… and that personnel have not been provided with the necessary protective equipment has probably contributed to the deaths in Swedish nursing homes. Witnesses also allege that there have been cases of staff working despite symptoms… and that it has been difficult to make [nursing home] employees follow basic hygiene practices.”

Sweden used to have a storage of seven million respiratory masks, as well as protective suits for adults and children during the Cold War. “The various types of respiratory protection were collected in emergency storages around the country with up to 250,000 pieces in each. The number varied depending on the size of the municipality. In the first decade of the 21st century, the stock was considered redundant and obsolete and everything was burnt,” states a brief text on the website of the Army Museum in Sweden. Although several of the masks were no longer functioning, 2.2 million respiratory masks were still adequate, but were burned anyway.

On March 28, realizing that Sweden was facing a shortage of protective equipment for medical personnel, Swedish regional authorities appeared simply to have lowered the protection requirements.

“Healthcare workers are worried that the country’s regions have lowered the requirements for personal protective equipment — for example, mouth protection will not be the standard”, noted Swedish Radio. According to Mia Lehtonen, a nurse at Karolinska’s staffing center and elected representative for the Healthcare Association:

“Back then [at the beginning of the outbreak] we would have mouth protection with HEPA filter, a cap… long-sleeved protective coat, rubber boots, gloves that were taped to the long-sleeved coat, and now – just a few weeks later – we are supposed to work according to just basic hygiene routines.”

In some hospitals health care personnel had to resort to protecting themselves with rain ponchos.

Despite the spread of the pandemic outside of Sweden — and neighboring countries such as Denmark and Norway locking down offices, businesses and schools — Tegnell opined that Swedish employees should not be allowed to work from home due to “equality” concerns:

“There is an equality aspect in this. There are certain groups in society that can [work from home], but not all, and how will we see to it so that we continue to have equality in society and that everyone has the same chance to stay healthy?”

Five days later, in mid-March, he encouraged people to think about working from home.

Even before mid-March, Sweden stopped testing how many people had been infected by the virus. “Now it is no longer important to know exactly how many people are infected in Sweden”, said Tegnell. Instead, authorities would look at how many people were committed to a hospital.

Some Swedish municipalities have even kept the number of infected elderly in their care a secret, according to Svt nyheter:

“For a long time, Sörmlands Media has tried to get information from all the county’s municipalities on how the spread of infection in elderly care looks, how extensive it is and where it is located. The municipalities have replied that they lack knowledge about the extent of the spread of infection and have said that it is also not possible to find out. Sörmland Media’s review, however, shows that the information is not correct and that the municipalities actively concealed the information… Some municipalities have also failed to report the number of infected persons to the National Board of Health and Welfare’s national reporting tool for orders for protective clothing. Something that, according to Sörmlands Media, may have affected the safety of the infection prevention work”.

Criticism of the government’s strategy has been articulated by 22 scientists, who wrote that the pandemic was being handled by “officials without talent”. One of the scientists behind the criticism, Dr. Stefan Hanson, a Swedish infectious disease expert, told the Canadian Globe and Mail:

“I think it’s a risky business and we don’t know anything about herd immunity. The only thing we know is that a lot of people have died. These are human beings, not just figures. And if we would have chosen another approach, this number would have been much smaller.”

According to the Globe and Mail:

“Dr. Hanson believes Dr. Tegnell deliberately pushed herd immunity and he should have followed the Norwegian, Danish and Finnish approach and introduced a lockdown. ‘You cannot take risks with people’s lives if you don’t know what risks you are taking'”.

“The COVID-19 death rate [in Sweden] is nine times higher than in Finland, nearly five times higher than in Norway, and more than twice as high as in Denmark,” where there were lockdowns, Hans Bergstrom, former editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s leading daily newspaper, wrote in April.

Despite not going into lockdown, Sweden’s economy is still taking a hit, although less severe than other European countries. Many Swedes, particularly those who are older, are limiting social interaction, travelling less and therefore consuming less in shops and restaurants. Sweden has also been exporting less because of the lockdowns in other countries. “Sweden’s government estimates… a 6% contraction in domestic consumption this year. Combined with a forecast 10% drop in exports, Swedish authorities predict, the result will be a 7% decline in overall 2020 economic output” according to The Wall Street Journal.

WHO – and the media — might wish to reconsider using Sweden as a model.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15984/coronavirus-swedish-model

A new study that examines the transmission of the novel Coronavirus by the University of Stirling in the UK noted that there was a “risk with waste water”.

Initially the discovery had not raised alarms, since it had been said that there was no risk of contagion.

But after the result of her research conducted on 8 wastewater samples collected from February 3 to 28 in the city of Milan and from March 31 to April 2 in Rome, Dr. Giuseppina La Rosa of the Environment and Health Department of the Higher Institute of Health, said: “In 2 samples collected in the sewerage system of the western and central-eastern area of Milan, the presence of RNA of the new Coronavirus was confirmed. In the case of Rome, the same positive result was found in all the samples taken in the eastern area of the city.”

Her claims, however, had not caused alarmism. “The result reinforces the prospects of using urban sewer water control as a non-invasive tool to detect the presence of infections in the population early,” responded the director of the ISS water quality and health department Luca Lucentini.

However, a more recent British study has completely overturned the initial belief, confronting the world with a new problem. In an article published in the journal Environment International, environmental biologists from the University of Stirling have advised governments not to overlook the phenomenon of a possible transmission of Coronavirus in wastewater.

Even infected water, therefore, can pose a risk of transmission. Dr. Richard Quilliam, who committed himself to the study, asked the British government to spend additional resources on investigating the case.

“Even if the sewage system could reveal useful information on the spread of the epidemic, it could also involve a fair risk of transmission,” said the scientist. “We know that Sars-CoV-2 is transmitted via objects or genetic material that carries the infection, it is not yet known whether the virus can be transmitted via the fecal-oral route, but recent studies have shown the presence of Covid-19 in feces, and the viral shedding of the digestive system can last longer than that of the respiratory tract.”

The researcher Manfred Weidmann and Dr. Vanessa Moresco also collaborated with Quilliam to carry out the study. “The main problem is that a significant percentage of patients with Coronavirus are asymptomatic, or exhibit very mild symptoms, for this there is a high risk of contagion. Lack of testing also makes it difficult to predict the scale of potential dissemination and the implications for public health,” said Weidmann. “The conformation of the virus also seems to suggest a different behavior of the disease in an aqueous environment. Some Coronaviruses can remain active in wastewater for about 14 days, depending on the environmental conditions,” added the scientist.

Of particular concern, are those areas where adequate hygienic conditions do not exist. In that case, the risk would even be very high. Experts have been urging countries to act quickly.

“At a time when the world is so concentrated on intervening on the respiratory tract, since it is a respiratory virus, one should not overlook the possibility that Sars-Cov-2 can also spread through the fecal-oral route,” they concluded.

freewestmedia.com/2020/05/09/covid-19-in-the-water/

A Syrian asylum-seeker who in 2017 broke into a kosher restaurant in the Dutch capital was again arrested for smashing its windows while holding a lighter.

Officers on Friday morning used pepper spray to subdue the 31-year-old man, Saleh Ali, outside HaCarmel restaurant, the Het Parool daily reported. He had used a metal pipe to smash the restaurant’s windows and was holding a lighter in the other hand.

He refused to let go of the objects, when police subdued him, police said in a statement. It called Ali’s actions “vandalism.”

According to Hidde van Koningsveld, policy officer at the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, which monitors anti-Semitic incidents in the Netherlands, the attack was the fifth case of vandalism or intimidation in 2 ½ years.

In January, unidentified perpetrators placed a box resembling a homemade bomb on the restaurant’s doorstep.

In 2017, Ali smashed the windows of HaCarmel with a wooden club while waving a Palestinian flag. He stole an Israeli flag hanging there. Police officers stood by as he vandalized the place but arrested him when he came out.

He was convicted of vandalism after 52 days in jail while awaiting his trial but was released with no additional penalty. Dutch Jews criticized the ruling because it did not contain a reference identifying his actions as a hate crime.

Commenting on Friday’s incident, van Koningsveld wrote on Twitter: “If the suspect is back on the streets in no time, and charged only with ‘vandalism,” then [Justice Minister] Ferd Grapperhaus will have some explaining to do.”

jta.org/quick-reads/man-arrested-trying-to-burn-israeli-flag-at-amsterdam-kosher-restaurant

Refugees from Afghanistan, Syria and Cameroon are suing Germany for invasion of privacy after the authorities allegedly checked their phones to prove their identities.

The refugees are a 37-year-old woman from Afghanistan, 25-year-old woman from Cameroon and 29-year-old man from Syria.

The authorities in Germany have the authority to examine the cell phones of the asylum seekers who do not have valid identity documents such passports, according to Mail Online.

However, Berlin’s Society of Civil Rights (GFF) is arguing that this method was used too quickly and is a violation of the refugees’ human rights.

The 29-year-old Mohammad, who was granted asylum in 2015 said “I didn’t know what exactly was happening, nobody had explained anything. But I was afraid to be deported, so I gave the mobile. It was as if I was handing over my whole life,” according to a statement released by the GFF.

A GFF lawyer Lea Beckmann said “The BAMF (Germany’s ministry for migration and refugees) is disregarding the strict constitutional rules by which the state must abide when accessing personal data.”

Meanwhile, a BAMF spokesperson said “A mobile phone is often the only, or a very important, source to establish the identity and nationality of people entering Germany without a passport or identification documents.”

khaama.com/refugees-from-afghanistan-and-2-other-countries-sue-germany-for-checking-their-phones-07778/

German police on Thursday raided apartments belonging to several suspected Islamists in Berlin, over allegations they fraudulently obtained state payouts set up for the coronavirus crisis. Over 100 police and emergency personnel searched the homes and vehicles of five people “belonging to the Salafist scene”, police said in a statement.

The suspects belonged to the “hard core” of attendees at the Fussilet former Islamist mosque that attained notoriety in Berlin and beyond.

The mosque is believed to have harboured several people classified as dangerous by German authorities, above all Anis Amri.

Tunisian Amri killed 12 in a truck ramming attack against a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016.

Among the five suspects targeted Thursday is a former associate of Amri’s and an imam, Berlin’s Tagesspiegel daily reported.

The group is believed to have “acquired in a fraudulent manner economic aid offered by the city of Berlin” to cushion the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, prosecutors said.

Sums of between €50,000 and €60,000 were involved, Tagesspiegel reported citing sources close to the probe.

In the depths of the virus crisis, German authorities quickly set up financial transfers to companies, freelancers and the self-employed to keep them afloat.

But the laxer controls have subsequently led to numerous fraud allegations.

A frequent trick by fraudsters was setting up fake websites to apply for the financial aid, aiming to collect real companies’ data — which they would then use for real applications and divert the handouts into their own pockets.

At the beginning of April, North Rhine-Westphalia temporarily halted aid payments after it was discovered that fraudsters were setting up fake websites to trick applicants.

https://www.thelocal.de/20200507/german-police-target-suspected-islamists-over-virus-fraud