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

The container ship “MV Marina” (photo above) rescued 79 boat migrants near Malta, without taking into account the risks that welcoming them could cause. Since Sunday the “rescued” are on the ship and are stuck for the time being. This causes aggressions among the refugees and causes anxiety among the crew, who barricade themselves for safety’s sake, apparently there is danger for life and limb. Now the shipping company warns of an escalation on board the ship.Some merchant ships already got the shock of their lives after the “sea rescue” of “shipwrecked boat refugees”, e.g. the oil tanker “El Hiblu 1” was captured – migrants revolted on the “Vos Thalassa” and threatened the crew.

politikstube.com/nach-seenotrettung-aggressive-migranten-auf-containerschiff-reederei-warnt-vor-eskalation/

By Rob Williamson

Whenever any mathematical model used to justify a proposed public policy produces predictions that turn out to vary wildly from what ultimately happens, those models deserve skeptical examination, something that is particularly true of the Imperial College CCP virus outcome model.  This model predicted such an overwhelming surge in expected deaths that our politicians gave us the lockdown.  Yet not only did the model overestimate the lethality of the virus by 95%, but its modelers were reported as keeping their code for the model confidential, which meant that it could not be independently verified.

Now a version of the code behind that model has been made public.  And a former Google senior software engineer with 30 years in the field has reviewed it.  The review is long and technical, but here’s one of many problems the reviewer identified:

Non-deterministic outputs. Due to bugs, the code can produce very different results given identical inputs.  They [the modelers] routinely act as if this is unimportant.

This problem makes the code unusable for scientific purposes, given that a key part of the scientific method is the ability to replicate results.  Without replication, the findings might not be real at all — as the field of psychology has been finding out to its cost.  Even if their original code was released, it’s apparent that the same numbers as in Report 9 might not come out of it.

Here are the review’s conclusions.

Conclusions. All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial’s modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn’t under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one.

On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded.  This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector.  Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on.  Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves.

After defending the fact that his article is pseudonymous, the reviewer added a final comment.

This situation has come about due to rampant credentialism and I’m tired of it. As the widespread dismay by programmers demonstrates, if anyone in SAGE or the Government had shown the code to a working software engineer they happened to know, alarm bells would have been rung immediately. Instead, the Government is dominated by academics who apparently felt unable to question anything done by a fellow professor.  Meanwhile, average citizens like myself are told we should never question “expertise.”  Although I’ve proven my Google employment to [the website’s publisher, unquestioning acceptance of “expertise”] is damaging and needs to end: please, evaluate the claims I’ve made for yourself, or ask a programmer you know and trust to evaluate them for you.

It is not news that governments and academic managers usually do not have the commercial experience to produce workable models or the discipline to employ competent “managers … to ensure their product [in this case, modeling software] is properly tested, understandable and so on.”  It has been ongoing in the U.K. “high tech” industries for some time.  Neville Shute, the late British aerial engineer and novelist, encountered the problem nearly one hundred years ago.  In his autobiography Slide Rule, he observed that civil servants are often not subject to commercial discipline (something usually true of academics, too).  Even if the civil servants do spot problems with erroneous yet popular opinions, we cannot expect the majority of them to make too much of a fuss, since such a course of action would put their families’ livelihoods at risk.  And Exhibit A in modern academia would be that nobody gave Professor Ferguson’s code to a third party for review or raised any questions about it before the lockdown began.

Let’s hope our politicians learn wisdom from this.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/the_unscientific_method_that_caused_worldwide_panics_and_lockdowns.html

General Michael Flynn hugged his lawyer, according to an interview with attorney Sidney Powell on “The Mark Levin Show,” and then posted to Twitter his reaction to the Department of Justice dropping his case on Thursday.

Holding the children’s book I Love You, Americanly, a book about the love of country and parent, Flynn’s grandson, a toddler identified as Travis, waved a little American flag and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

Flynn wrote above the video, “My grandson Travis…’and JUSTICE for ALL.’”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2020/05/07/general-flynn-sends-powerful-message-after-the-big-news-about-his-case-and-it-stars-his-grandson-n389064

By Monica Showalter

Adam Schiff, the fanatic who from the begining launched probe after probe of President Trump, is about to see the 2017-2018 Russia collusion transcripts he’s been sitting on all these months released to the public, all 6,000 pages, with 73 witnesses stating there was no Russian collusion in 53 transcripts. National Intelligence Director Richard Grenell did the job Schiff wouldn’t do, releasing the transcripts, and now Schiff is expected to be looking more bug-eyed than usual. 

According to Fox News:

 Transcripts of House Intelligence Committee interviews that have been cleared for release show top law enforcement and intelligence officials affirming they had no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election, senior administration and intelligence community officials told Fox News on Wednesday.

This would align with the results of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation — which found no evidence of illegal or criminal coordination between President Trump, the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016 — but the numerous transcribed interviews could raise further questions about committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s past statements saying that there was “direct evidence” of collusion.“Schiff is in panic mode,” a senior administration official told Fox News.

Those would be the original Russia collusion transcripts, released after a House investigation he called for, after claiming he had proof positive that President Trump colluded with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.

Schiff, recall, had been making statements like this to a fawning press in 2017:

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the Ranking Member on the committee, was asked by Chuck Todd on “Meet The Press Daily” whether or not he only has a circumstantial case.”Actually no, Chuck,” he said. “I can tell you that the case is more than that and I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now.”

Schiff later claimed he had “direct evidence” of collusion in fact, stating in 2019:

“I think there is direct evidence in the emails from the Russians through their intermediary offering dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of what is described in writing as the Russian government effort to help elect Donald Trump,” Schiff said during an appearance on Sunday on CBS’ “Face The Nation.”Schiff added: “They offer that dirt. There is an acceptance of that offer in writing from the president’s son, Don Jr., and there is overt acts and furtherance of that… That to me is direct evidence.”

And this drumbeat of fanciful claims that the transcripts would indicate he knew was false expose him now as telling “lie after lie after lie” as House ranking intelligence committee member Devin Nunes put it. “Look for witnesses who were not so truthful,” he told Fox Business. If so, there must be some doozies.

As for Schiff, it was all about covering up the evidence and then lying about it to the fawning media. He told lies all right, and the bad part was they had consequences. Schiff’s claims were among the reasons why a naive attorney general, Jeff Sessions, went ahead and appointed a Special Counsel to investigate President Trump, which, as with the congressional investigation, came up empty. Maybe if those 73 interviews in those 53 transcripts had been out there, they’d all have known this was bogus information before wasting all those millions to come up empty too.

Now it’s Schiff’s turn on the hot seat. Which is appropriate, given that he’s the principle liar. The emperor of collusion is about to be exposed as having no clothes and it’s not going to be a pretty picture. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/russian_collusion_emperor_adam_schiff_about_to_be_exposed_today_and_it_wont_be_pretty.html

Czech police officers have arrested an Afghan man on the D1 motorway near Prague who was suspected of attempting to murder his girlfriend in Germany, the Czech General Inspectorate of Security Forces (GIBS) announced along with an investigation regarding how the suspect was able to enter the Czech Republic during the coronavirus lockdown.

The 32-year-old Afghan man, who reportedly inflicted 20 stab wounds to his girlfriend, left Germany with his one-and-a-half-year-old child. Surprisingly, the German woman survived the attack, which is currently under investigation by German police.

Czech police received information about the search for the suspected Afghan from their German colleagues on Tuesday evening. Police officers then tracked his vehicle down within 45 minutes.

Several police patrols blocked the Peugeot with a German vehicle registration plate, which resulted in the closure of one lane of the Czech motorway.

Czech authorities are also concerned that the Afghan suspect was able to cross the Czech border despite current border security measures implemented due to coronavirus pandemic. Currently, everyone crossing the border has to pass a border check.

According to the spokesman of the Czech Police Presidium Ondřej Moravčík, the man crossed the border at a time when he was not yet in the database of wanted persons, but the incident will still be investigated.

“The General Inspectorate of Security Forces will investigate the circumstances under which he was allowed to enter our country,” added Moravčík.

rmx.news/article/article/czech-police-arrest-afghan-migrant-who-stabbed-his-girlfriend-20-times-in-germany