Nigel Farage on VE Day 75th Anniversary
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Refugees from Afghanistan and 2 other countries sue Germany for checking their phones
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/
Berlin police raid radical Islamists over coronavirus aid fraud
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
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After “sea rescue”: Violent migrants on German container ship – Shipping company warns of an escalation of violence
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/
The unscientific method that caused worldwide panics and lockdowns
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.
General Flynn Sends Powerful Message After the Big News About His Case and it Stars His Grandson
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.’”
