The current entry bans at Germany’s borders due to the Coronavirus crisis do not apply to asylum seekers.

The Federal Ministry of the Interior told Berlin weekly Junge Freiheitthat here are exceptions for goods traffic and commuters… and for asylum seekers.

Germany has been manning its borders with France, Switzerland and Luxembourg since the beginning of the week. No other EU member can enter the country without good reason, but asylum seekers are still welcome.

This means that if a migrant travels to France or Switzerland via Italy, for example, and reaches the German border, he only needs to apply for asylum and is allowed to go to Germany to start the procedure.

French or Italians, on the other hand, who have no permanent residence in Germany or work there, are rejected at the border and returned. This was confirmed by a spokeswoman for the Federal Ministry of the Interior when asked by the JF.

“At the German EU external borders (airports and seaports) there has been no change in the previous procedure. This also applies to the internal Schengen borders,” she said when asked whether asylum seekers were still admitted to Germany.

While the basic freedom of movement of people is restricted or even suspended for EU citizens, non-EU foreigners are still allowed to travel around unhindered, even if they spread the Coronavirus. The word “asylum” is seemingly some kind of antidote to the virus as far as the government is concerned.

freewestmedia.com/2020/03/22/germany-still-welcomes-asylum-seekers-despite-covid-19/

Boris Johnson’s decision to push through Brexit has saved the UK from a huge financial bill from the EU, amid fears that Brussels could demand billions of euros from member-states as part of a huge coronavirus bailout. Boris Johnson avoided an “economic catastrophe” by pushing through Brexit “at the right time,” according to former Brexit Party candidate Mitch Feierstein. The UK could have been subject to Brussels demands to contribute towards a mammoth financial bailout for central banks that have failed during the coronavirus. Speaking to RT, Mr Feierstein warned that the UK should “not pick up any part” of the EU’s massive bailout fund.

He told RT: “This is a sign we got out in time.

“They want to take the European fund to bailout the banks that will fail during this next depression and fault wave that is coming and spend that on coronavirus and getting the economy back on track.

“However they need to have a buffer fund for the banks that will fail and we shouldn’t pic up any that of the tab for that.”

This comes as Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte demanded that the EU make use of its €500billion fund.

Earlier this week, the European Central Bank (ECB) has launched an emergency £700bn package to ease the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

This will see the ECB buy government and company debt across the eurozone, including that of troubled Greece and Italy.

ECB boss Christine Lagarde tweeted “there are no limits” to its commitment to the euro.

Brussels has also relaxed budget rules for the first time and allowed member states to redirect money allocated for other purposes to fight the virus.

However, the EU officials have also stressed that Brussels could run out of money, after admitting there are limits to how much financial support can be made available directly from the EU budget, which is approaching the end of a seven-year cycle.

The EU27 failed to agree to a new budget earlier this year, leaving the current funds drained and at risk. 

National governments are exploring ways to make greater use of other central resources such as the European Investment Bank and the euro area’s bailout fund.

Mr Feierstein also urged Prime Minister Johnson not to back down to EU pressure by extending the Brexit deadline beyond the end of this year.

He explained: “I don’t think he needs to extend the Brexit deadline. We have all the cards. We have three aces, they have a pair of twos.

 “They are trying to bluff with no hand. They are playing this game the wrong way.

“Basically they need us more than we need them, if you look at the cash flows going back and forth.

“The debt problems they have are magnitudes more than we have. They want to make an example out of the UK but now is not the time to do that.

“This is a bad sign for the EU. More will follow Britain out of Brussels’ control.”

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1258385/Brexit-Coronavirus-COVID-19-European-Union-Brussels-Ursula-von-der-Leyen-Boris

(Some of the tweets of military hardware in Germany have already been removed. There are a lot of twitter and YT videos of heavy military equipment moving around in Germany, mostly by rail.)

https://vladtepesblog.com/

The LNA successfully ambushed and defeated one of the field commanders of the internationally recognized but disputed forces of the Libyan Government of National Accord’s (GNA).

The leader of the Omar Mukhtar Brigade, Ziyad Balaam, was a terrorist connected with Al-Qaeda in Ain Zara. On Wednesday, March 18, militants of the GNA, along with Syrian mercenaries (transferred by Turkey to Tripoli earlier), attacked LNA positions in Ain Zara. However, the military succeeded in repulsing the attack, which eliminated 36 terrorists, including six high ranking GNA field commanders.

Ziyad Balaam had been classified on the UN sanction list because of his terrorist activities. The group, to which Ziyad Balaam belonged – Ansar al-Sharia – was designated by the UN as the Al-Qaida affiliated militant group.

Ansar al-Sharia is one of the most violent Salafist militias that has been operating in Libya since 2012. The main goal of the group is to transform Libya into an “Islamic State” in accordance with sharia. According to the United Nations, Ansar al-Sharia in Libya supervised training camps in the country “mainly for the benefit of Al-Qaida associated groups in Syria and in Iraq”.

Although Ansar al-Sharia denied any official connection, the group’s former emir Mohamed al-Zahawi openly praised al-Qaida in a 2012 BBC interview. In 2014, after the launch of the “Operation Dignity” by General Haftar, a part of Ansar al-Sharia terrorists defected and were integrated into the ISIS (including the founder of Ansar al-Sharia Abu Sufyan Bin Qumu and the militia’s senior sharia official Abu Abdullah al-Libi).

Ziyad Balaam had been closely collaborating with the GNA of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj. A member of al-Qaida, one of the field commanders of the so-called radical-Sunni “Council of Benghazi Revolutionaries’ Shura” – in September 2012, as part of a group of jihadists from Ansar al-Sharia, attacked the American Consulate in Benghazi.

Ziyad Balaam had been heading the gang formation of the “Benghazi Defense Brigade”, which consists of fighters from the unit formed in 2016, with the group quickly declaring its loyalty to the Government of National Accord.

In the same year, the “Benghazi Defense Brigade” attempted to repel the Oil Crescent from the LNA, but was defeated. This attack was actively supported by Fathi Bashaga, the current Interior Minister of the GNA.

Ziyad Balaam had lived in Misrata until April 2019. After the LNA announced the beginning of the final phase of its anti-terrorist operation, Balaam moved to Tripoli, where he joined the ranks of GNA field commanders. Throughout the year, he commanded militant groups in Ain Zara.

After the attack against the US consulate in Benghazi in 2012, Turkey officially recognized this group as terrorists. But after Ziayad Balaam entered the Benghazi Revolutionaries’ Shura, Ankara dropped all claims against him. He started making regular trips to Istanbul, which intensified in 2018 and became regular until recently. After his latest injury, he was sent from Tripoli to an Istanbul hospital where he died according to a version of his demise circulating on social media.

As per LNA sources, he had played an active role in transferring Syrian jihadist groups to Tripoli through Turkey and had been integrating them into the GNA’s armed forces to fight against General Haftar.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights published an investigation in which it was noted that Turkey had proposed a salary of 2 000 to 2 500 USD to jihadists for the three-month-contract for fighting on the side of GNA. According to the Observatory, nearly 2 400 Syrian mercenaries and terrorists had already relocated from northern Syria to Tripoli. It added that about 1 700 other recruits had already arrived in Turkey to take training courses before being shipped off to Libya.

freewestmedia.com/2020/03/21/the-death-blow-against-terrorism-in-libya/

by Giulio Meotti

At the beginning there were the pages of the funeral announcements of the local newspaper L’Eco di Bergamo that have gone viral around the world, increased from 1 page to 10 in the last month. Now it’s the local news that comes from the nursing homes.

Almost 1 out of every 3 elderly citizens in Italy are hospitalized in the epicenter of the virus, between Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna and Veneto. The pandemic is decimating those who live in nursing homes, as happeed in Madrid at the “Monte Hermoso” Institute and as happened in South Korea at the Daenam institute.

In the Forlinese area, Covid-19 spread within a retirement home, the Pellegrino Artusi of Forlimpopoli. Of the 35 residents, 25 are positive and 2 have died. In a nursing home in Quinzano, in the Brescia area, 20 elderly people have already died since the beginning of the emergency. 5 of them within a few hours. Only 1 of them had been swabbed and tested positive. The rest of them just died, not even knowing if they had contracted the disease, due to the respiratory problems it causes.

After the Barbariga case, with 7 elderly people who died within a few days, 9 residents of that same nursing home died in Calcinato in a week. Another 5 died between Friday the 13th and Saturday the 14th of March in the nursing home Don Ciriaco Vezzoli of Cividate al Piano in the Bergamo area.

The virus is “working” its way through the nursing home in Mombretto, Mediglia: 44 have already died, a third of the facility’s total number of elderly. It is a veritable coming and going of funeral cars at the home.

There are already 15 deaths since the end of February in a hospice in Gandino, near Bergamo, where the number of coronavirus victims is much higher than it appears officially. According to the mayor Giorgio Gori, “many”of the dead had not been swabbed. It is the same situation in Scanzorosciate, where the mayor Davide Casati says: “In the period from the 2nd to the 15th of  March 2019 we had 6 elderly deaths, all in the rest home. We are up tot 36 in the same two weeks this year”.

Gori reported that there were 164 deaths in Bergamo in the first two weeks of March, including 31 attributed to the virus, a figure that must be compared with the 56 deaths in the same period last year. Even adding the 31 coronavirus deaths to the total would result in 77 more deaths, an increase suggesting that the virus could have caused significantly more deaths than officially registered.

Emilio Tanzi, director of Cremona Solidale, a 460-bed nursing home, says there has been a significant and “anomalous” increase in deaths since March 2, when the epidemic started to grow in Italy. In one day, last week, there were 18 deaths in his facility, all patients with breathing difficulties. Walter Montini, president of Arsac, which represents 30 homes for the elderly in the province of Cremona, says that in a small nursing home with 36 beds, there were 7 deaths in a day. In a Merlara nursing home, 60 of the 69 elderly are coronavirus positive and four are already dead.

The bodies of these respected elders of the community are wrapped in special plastic bags and buried with the sole blessing of a priest. This is how they pass away, in silence, even left outside the medical statistics that arrive every evening, without even the final greeting and contact of loved ones. This is the way we take our leave of the generation that rebuilt Italy in the post-war period.

It is not an epidemic. It is a nightmare.  

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/25411

Clashes between the police and young migrants in Lesbos.

The German Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer, is sticking to his promise to accept a limited number of under-age refugees from Greek camps, despite the entry restrictions. “We have promised to participate in the refugee acceptance”, Seehofer told the news magazine “Der Spiegel”. “We are sticking to this.”

politikstube.com/das-sind-die-minderjaehrigen-migranten-die-seehofer-nach-deutschland-holen-moechte/

Since the outbreak of coronavirus in Italy, Italians have learned that other European Union member states do not always practice the beautiful words that they like to preach — especially solidarity.

Solidarity is supposedly a fundamental principle of the European Union. It is enshrined in the EU treaties and the EU refers to it as one of its goals. According to article 222 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, one of the two principal treaties of the European Union:

“The Union and its Member States shall act jointly in a spirit of solidarity if a Member State is… the victim of a natural or man-made disaster. The Union shall mobilise all the instruments at its disposal… to assist a Member State in its territory, at the request of its political authorities, in the event of a natural or man-made disaster”.

The EU has invoked the solidarity principle when it comes to receiving migrants: During the 2015 migrant crisis, the EU assigned each EU country a fixed quota of migrants and refugees to accept. In 2017, the EU took Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) over their refusal to take migrants. In late October 2019, the Advocate General, legal advisor to the Court, said that EU law must be followed and that the EU’s principle of solidarity “necessarily sometimes implies accepting burden-sharing”. The Court has yet to issue a ruling on the issue, but it usually follows the advice of the Advocate General.

The EU even has a specific unit, the Emergency Response Coordination Centre(ERCC), which operates under the EU’s Civil Protection Mechanism, which helps both EU and certain non-EU states with crisis management, in accordance with the solidarity principle. This is where Italy appealed for help at the beginning of its coronavirus crisis — and received in return exactly nothing. “We asked for supplies of medical equipment, and the European Commission forwarded the appeal to the member states,” Italy’s permanent representative to the EU, Maurizio Massari, told Foreign Policy. “But it didn’t work.”

In addition, Germany and France, leading EU member states, even imposed bans or limitations on the export of facemasks and protective equipment. This drewmild criticism from European Union officials, such as Stella Kyriakides, the EU’s Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, who had to remind member states, fruitlessly, that, “Solidarity is key.”

In the past, EU member states have shown solidarity. According to its website, since its inception in 2001, the EU Civil Protection Mechanism has responded to more than 330 requests for assistance inside and outside the EU. In July 2018, for instance, when Sweden was facing widespread wildfires, primarily forest fires, EU member states sent firefighting assistance.

The coronavirus outbreak, however, is different from geographically isolated crises, such as forest fires in a member state that can be managed by pooling firefighting or other resources. When an entire continent is in the midst of a highly contagious virus epidemic, solidarity becomes a more complex issue. Every state inevitably considers whether it can afford to send facemasks and protective equipment that might be needed for its own citizens. In other words, every state considers its own national interest first. In the case of Italy’s appeal for help, EU member states made their own interests their highest priority. This is classic state behavior and would not have caused any outrage prior to the establishment of the European Union.

What the coronavirus crisis reveals is that the member states of the European Union will revert to national interests when extreme circumstances call for it. While such revelations may not spell the immediate end of the European Union, they certainly raise questions about the point of an organization that pledges solidarity as a founding principle, but abandons that principle the moment it is most called for.

Coronavirus, however, is not the only recent issue to put into question the viability of the European Union.

The current crisis on the Greek-Turkish border has shown the EU not only as unhelpful, but an actual liability: The EU left an already overwhelmed Greece to deal with the migrant crisis — manufactured by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for political gain — on its own, despite the apparent rhetorical support by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who called Greece Europe’s “shield”.

On top of Europe’s attempts to deal with the coronavirus outbreak, the EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, ordered that Greece must allow the migrants that Erdogan transported to the border to apply for asylum. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had announced earlier that Greece was suspending all asylum applications based on article 78 (3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which states:

“In the event of one or more Member States being confronted by an emergency situation characterised by a sudden inflow of nationals of third countries, the Council, on a proposal from the Commission, may adopt provisional measures for the benefit of the Member State(s) concerned”.

Ylva Johansson, however, said that the commission would not propose suspending the right to asylum:

“Individuals in the European Union have the right to apply for asylum. This is in the treaty, this is in international law. This we can’t suspend.”

Suspending all common sense, however, is apparently something of which the EU is fully capable. As Johansson was making her irrational demands to Greece at a time when Europe was at a breaking point grappling with the coronavirus outbreak, German Chancellor Angela Merkel appeared to show signs that she might submit to Erdogan’s migrant blackmail. Less than two weeks after Erdogan had thousands of migrants transported to the border with Greece, Merkel said, according to a report by Die Welt, that she would work “with all her strength” to “take the EU-Turkey agreement to a new level”.

The agreement to which Merkel was referring is the 2016 deal between the EU and Turkey, to hold migrants in Turkey in exchange for six billion euros. Up until now, the EU had focused less on Turkey’s other demands, also written in the 2016 deal, but Merkel’s recent statement brought the issues back into focus: Visa-free travel for Turks in the EU, duty-free movement of Turkish goods within the EU, the setting up of a “safe zone” in northern Syria, and the resumption of regular meetings between Turkey and the EU.

If the EU were to approve visa-free travel for Turks — or whoever has the means to buy a Turkish passport — millions of Turks would be able to enter the EU legally and potentially “disappear” there. Already at breaking point, the EU would arguably become a very different kind of “European” Union with Turkey, a country of 80 million people, literally invited to enter Europe.

Germany also pledged more money for Turkey. According to Deutsche Welle, Merkel told Erdogan that she was willing to increase EU funds for “the care of refugees in Turkey in return for Ankara stopping thousands of refugees attempting to cross the Turkish-Greek border”.

Turkey’s migrant blackmail worked surprisingly well and surprisingly fast. “We must not allow refugees to be turned into pawns for geopolitical interests,” announced German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas at the beginning of the Greek border crisis. “No matter who tries, they must reckon with our resistance.” Germany, and the EU with it, has been exposed as a house of cards. As the house folded, the world was left in little doubt that Erdogan was running the show.

Consequently, on March 18, Erdogan announced that the migrant crisis that he had orchestrated was officially over: Turkey was closing its borders with Greece and Bulgaria, ostensibly due to the coronavirus. The Telegraph cited reports from Turkish news website Medyascope that around 150 buses had been readied to collect migrants from the border and ferry them back to Istanbul and refugee camps. Erdogan got what he wanted.

All Erdogan needs to do now it sit back and wait for the EU, with Merkel at the helm, to meet his demands.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15774/european-union-the-end

While leftists in the U.S. echoed the Chinese Communist Party in branding President Trump racist for calling the coronavirus Chinese, a virus expert in Italy warned that the Italian government stalled in its response to the virus due to politics and fears of racism — and that stalling cost lives. Regardless of political correctness, the Chinese coronavirus started in China and taking concrete action to ban Chinese travel and to isolate people coming from China has been very effective in curbing the virus’s spread.

Italy’s death toll overtook China’s on Thursday, with more than 41,000 confirmed cases and 3,405 deaths.

Dr. Giorgio Palù, the former president of the European and Italian Society for Virology and a professor of virology and microbiology at the University of Padova, told CNN that politics and fears of racism hamstrung the Italian government’s response.

The government was “lazy in the beginning… too much politics in Italy,” Palù said. “There was a proposal to isolate people coming from the epicenter, coming from China. Then it became seen as racist, but they were people coming from the outbreak.” This unwillingness to contain people who posed the greatest risk contributed to the devastating situation, he argued.

Yet this political correctness was not limited to Italy’s national government, as Voice of Europe pointed out.

Northern Italy has been hit hardest by the outbreak, and leaders there encouraged behavior that spreads the virus. Dario Nardella, the Mayor of Florence, urged Italians to “hug a Chinese” in early February, warning that coronavirus fears were leading to racism against Chinese people. Nardella, a member of the left-wing Democratic Party, even tweeted a video of himself hugging a Chinese man.

Videos even showed Italians hugging a Chinese man in an effort to show their solidarity. While the videos may be inspiring in another context, they could be seen as chilling, given the coronavirus outbreak in Italy.

Northern Italy now has the most cases of coronavirus. The Governor of Lombardy recently warned citizens that they must follow the curfew strictly as hospitals will soon be overwhelmed with patients.

Left-leaning media outlets in the U.S. have parroted the line that Trump’s decision to call the virus the “Chinese coronavirus” is racist, even though the president is pushing back on Chinese Communist Party propaganda blaming the U.S. for the virus.

If this Italian virologist is correct, however, these fears of racism are not just overblown but downright deadly. Bad responses to the virus, however well-intentioned, can have a tragic human cost.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/politics-and-fears-of-racism-helped-coronavirus-spread-in-italy-virus-expert-warns/