Olympics star and former Strictly winner Louis Smith has been accused of mocking Islam after appearing in a video with a mate drunkenly pretending to pray.

The footage shows him with fellow gymnast Luke Carson yelling “Allahu Akbar”, an Islamic phrase meaning “God is the greatest”.

The video, apparently shot in selfie mode by Smith during a friend’s hotel wedding bash, has been widely passed around online.

The Team GB star, 27 — who was awarded an MBE in 2013 — and Carson, 26, appear to have been drinking.Smith is shown giggling and holding a drink as Carson takes a hanging rug off the wall.

The medal holder then chortles “Six o’clock prayers” as the friend repeatedly says “Allahu Akbar”.

Carson then kneels on the rug, bowing in mock worship before the pair yell in indecipherable howls.

At that point an elderly female wedding guest enters the frame and sits down next to the friend.

She puts her hand on his shoulder and says: “Actually, you are taking the p***, actually.”

But Smith retorts: “No, no he’s not, he’s doing his six o’clock prayers.”

Slurring Carson yells out, “The prophet Mohammed”, before Smith says: “Sixty virgins”.

It continues as the woman says: “You are not funny.”

Smith insists: “Yes it is.”

Last night a security source said of the video, taken at the wedding of gymnast Dan Keatings at Kettering Park Hotel, Northants: “Mocking religion is pretty foolish anyway.

“In the case of Islam, it can also be quite a risky thing to do.”

Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the Ramadan Foundation, said of Smith: “I think he should apologise immediately.

“Our faith is not to be mocked, our faith is to be celebrated and I think people will be offended.”

Smith, who has won two Olympics silvers and a bronze, triumphed on Strictly in 2012.

The Team GB star has previously spoken about his own Christian beliefs.

He was contacted for a comment but did not respond.

Last night retired ex-international Carson said: “It was a three-minute video of us just fooling around.”

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1934586/olympic-ace-louis-smith-accused-of-mocking-islam-after-yelling-allahu-akbar-and-pretending-to-pray-in-boozy-video/

Angela Merkel may just have pushed through rapid deportation rules as well as a ban on refugees but she is not planning on closing Germany’s doors to migrants forever.

Just last week the under-fire German Chancellor placed a ban on the families of as many as three million people who arrived in Germany during the migrant crisis joining their relatives.

The ban, which also applies to women and children and elderly relatives from war torn countries, has been put in place for two years after the country revealed the crisis will cost £37bn this year.Now just days after the Bundestag voted to speed up deportation and mandatory finger printing, it’s emerged they have outlined the country needs 300,000 people a YEAR for the next 40 years to stop population decline.

A leaked report from Mrs Merkel’s government said Germany would need to take in 12m migrants over the next four decades to keep Germany’s population size stable.

But the staggering figures unearthed by the Rheinische Post are only set to infuriate far-right voters who are already reeling after almost 2.2 million migrants flooded into the country in 2015 alone.

According to local reports a new report drafted by the Government has admitted the issue of migrant integration is a thorny subject.

The report on refugee integration states: “According to the experiences this will not be easy and will last longer than initially often hoped.

“Successes will only be visible in the medium to long term.”

Locally, Mrs Merkel’s government is coming under pressure after it was deemed that 345,000 new homes have to be built each year to house those travelling to the country to live.

However the cost of living is rising in Germany with rents apparently becoming unsustainable.

During her award speech, Mrs Merkel said: “Europe is our best assurance to live in peace and security. 

“It should be possible for us to revive Europe. 

“For today’s generation, the generation would have to invest as much energy as it has invested in post-war generation to build Europe”.

But her acceptance of the award was not welcomed by everyone.

Hans-Ulrich Rülke, head of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), told newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine: “It is already a lot of ignorance to consider the course of Chancellor Merkel in 2015 as correct. 

“With the uncontrolled admission of hundreds of thousands of people from safe third countries, the Federal Government ignored European law and made it difficult to resolve the refugee crisis on a European scale.”

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/765919/Angela-Merkel-Germany-European-Migrant-Crisis-12-million?fbclid=IwAR2gSzVzlHBffLgg_OGBuhLmCXlPR_vJ878063MrmISti9cvCKXxWR_i9D8

Germany’s publically-funded ZDF station must officially apologize to the World Association of Home Army (AK) Soldiers for the false depiction of Polish soldiers in the “Our mothers, our fathers’ program, decreed the Kraków Court of Appeal

According to the ruling, the television series falsely depicted Polish Home Army (AK) as an anti-Semitic organization. The German companies committed the infringement “through identifying a Polish underground unit in the movie as an AK unit, which created the false suggestion that the Polish military organization was anti-Semitic in character”.

The court explained that the creators of the show had dressed up representatives of a Polish underground unit in white-red ‘AK’ bands. Through this, the creators specified that representatives of the AK were disdainful towards Jews and promoted anti-Semitism. The court emphasized that the showrunners’ actions permitted the reception of the AK as a formation which was anti-Semitic.

The ruling declared that such an identification of the AK was a transgression of freedom of expression.

The apology is to be published on the 1^st channel of Polish public television TVP1 and on the channels of German television station which broadcasted the show. They are also to be published on ZDF and UFA Fiction websites and maintained for three months.

The three-part TV series “Our mothers, our fathers” was first broadcasted by ZDF in March 2013. It was also aired on Polish public television channel TVP1. It sparked massive controversy in Germany and Poland concerning the depiction of Poles in the show, as well as the issue of German responsibility for crimes committed during World War II.

The lawsuit against the German creators was filed by the World Association of Home Army Soldiers along with 96-year-old Zbigniew Radłowski who was a member of the AK.

The Polish Home Army (AK) was the main resistance movement in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War. It was officially formed in 1942, politically backed by the Polish government in London and became the largest resistance movement in Europe during the war.

https://rmx.news/article/article/polish-court-creators-of-german-public-tv-station-must-apologize-to-poles

Another huge bonus of Covid regs. It makes sure imncumbants can stay in office as well as leftist challengers. We know the latter from mail in ballots, good for all except Amazon, and now we see how people running against the Mayor of London UK are getting threatened by police for breaking Covid regs even though they have “no evidence”.

Prosecutors inside of a courtroom in Roanne — a small commune in the Loire department in central France — on Tuesday formally indicted a 19-year-old Nigerian, charging the teenage migrant with kidnapping and sexually assaulting an 11-year-old mentally disabled girl.

Police say that the Nigerian — an asylum seeker and former so-called ‘unaccompanied minor’ — kidnapped the pre-teen, mentally-disabled girl on Sunday evening, and held her against her will for several hours in a hotel room in the neighboring town of Coteau, the French newspaper Le Figaro reports.

The victim’s worried parents initially contacted police at around 5 p.m. after the young girl failed to come home from her usual Sunday walk to the city center of Roanne despite having left the family home at 10 a.m. that morning.

Using the geolocation of the girl’s cell phone, video surveillance, and a team of K9s, authorities managed to find the young girl in the hotel room in the early hours of Monday morning partially naked, leading them to believe that she had been a victim of sexual assault. However, after being taken to the hospital, the medical examiners full-scale inspection revealed that the 11-year-old had not been raped.

Judicial police, who were called upon to help local police with the case, arrested the young migrant male who was with the 11-year-old girl, who was physically safe but reportedly in shock — at the Lemon Hotel where he resides at around 1:20 a.m.

The pre-teen victim, who was discovered in the Nigerian migrant’s hotel room, told investigators that he forcibly touched and kissed her during the time he held her captive.

The Nigerian, who purports to have invited the girl to his home because she was hungry, refutes all claims of sexual assault made by the girl, even going so far as to allege that it was, in fact, the young girl who had made sexual advances on him.

According to a report from local media, the teenage asylum seeker also claims to have made the decision to keep her at his hotel room overnight because all public transport systems had ceased their activities for the night.

The lawyers in charge of prosecuting the Nigerian migrant for his alleged crimes are unconvinced by his story. On Tuesday, prosecutors slapped the 19-year-old with kidnapping charges, as well as forcible confinement and sexual assault of a minor under 15 years old. Prosecutors also requested that the judge place the accused in pre-trial detention given the severity of the alleged crimes.

For his offenses, the asylum seeker faces up to 10 years in prison.

In France and in other Western European countries, serious issues involving migrants and sexual assaults exist, including in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. 

Last September, a 50-year-old Algerian man who had previously worked as a nurse at a prominent hospital in suburb of Paris was convicted of having drugged and raped a female patient under his care in the American Hospital of Neuilly-sur-Seine, Remix News reported. It was not his first such crime either. The convicted man — who had worked at the hospital since 2006 — had also been convicted in 2012 for “sexual assault on a vulnerable person”.

France: Nigerian migrant charged with kidnapping and sexual assaulting 11-year-old mentally disabled girl

A cow, conscious, is hung up by one leg. She wriggles, tries to free herself. Then the cut through the throat. A last scream, then only gasping – until the animal bleeds out and dies after several minutes of agony. Sheep are not restrained or even anaesthetised either.

Just imagining these scenes is an ordeal for many. But they are real, originating in the Prott slaughter and meat centre in Selm ( North Rhine-Westphalia ), a German family business.

For four weeks, hidden cameras were in the slaughter rooms recording the plight of the cattle and sheep, which were kept under catastrophic conditions and killed in the most brutal way without anaesthesia. According to the association SOKO Animal Protection, 99 per cent of the slaughters were carried out in this way.

According to Friedrich Mülln, founder of SOKO Animal Protection, this is “the largest exposure of an illegal slaughter operation that Germany has ever seen”.

The meat from this slaughterhouse was supplied to supermarkets and butchers throughout the Ruhr area!

In addition to the slaughterhouse operator, SOKO Animal Protection also accuses the veterinary office, because no inspections by the office can be seen on the entire video footage. Mülln to the newspaper BILD: “The veterinary office was simply not there – a total failure of the state”.

And further: “It is the duty of the state to prevent such cruelty to animals. The only question that remains to me is: Is there total incompetence or bribery involved? Because I can’t really explain something like that.”

In fact, the operator was already sentenced to a fine for illegal slaughter more than 20 years ago. At the time, the veterinary office had found out about him because they noticed that the stunning bolt shot on the head was missing when they checked the animal waste.

Perfidious: The current video shows that the butcher shot the animal with a bolt after it had bled to death in order to avoid being caught again.

Volker Meier, spokesman for the responsible veterinary office in Unna, explains the lack of controls as follows: “Slaughterings have to be declared, which was not the case here. And we didn’t notice anything during the inspections.”

Mülln adds: “We know that slaughtering takes place illegally in backyards in Germany. Some religions want such meat. This family has officially advertised since 1998 that they only slaughter sheep and cattle. This indicates that they exclude pigs and are targeting a certain group,” says Mülln.

This means, for example, Muslims who eat meat only “halal” (Arabic), i.e. “pure” in the religious sense. For this, the animal must be completely bled without anaesthesia. In Germany, however, anaesthesia during slaughter is compulsory, and currently not a single slaughterhouse in North Rhine-Westphalia has an exemption permit.

Moreover, the Prott family slaughterhouse does not slaughter according to religious guidelines.

Mülln: “You see ‘halal’ everywhere, but that doesn’t automatically mean that the animals have been slaughtered. In the case of large poultry companies in Germany, for example, it means that the slaughter process is directed towards Mecca. The animals are anaesthetised in the normal way. At the beginning of the slaughter day, an Arabic saying is shouted to the heavens, and that’s it.”

BILD confronted the slaughterhouse operator Hubert Prott with the accusations. He says: “I know nothing about it. My Turkish employees start at 4 am, I only arrive at 8 am.” If he is allowed to reopen at some point, however, he does not want to hire the Turkish staff again and employ German staff.

But ignorance is no excuse. The animal rights activists also claim: The owner himself can be seen on the video footage – so he should know exactly what happened to the animals on his farm.

In the past four years alone, SOKO Animal Protection has uncovered eleven slaughterhouses in Germany that do not comply with animal law. Mülln is appalled that the veterinary office repeatedly fails to do justice to their duties: “Control cannot be SOKO Animal Protection’s job. How is this supposed to go on? Are we supposed to uncover the 100th slaughterhouse at some point and close the 80th? That is simply the task of the authorities!”

The video recordings are now with the public prosecutor’s office in Dortmund. Among other things, they are investigating violations of the Animal Welfare Act. The farm has also been closed since Friday, and the operators have been banned from working with animals for the time being.

https://m.bild.de/news/inland/news-inland/schlachthof-in-nrw-schaechtet-hunderte-tiere-soko-tierschutz-deckt-auf-75835030,view=amp.bildMobile.html