Former Mexican President Vicente Fox on Friday kept up his withering criticism of Donald Trump, saying the GOP front-runner reminds him of Adolf Hitler.
"Today, he's going to take that nation (U.S.) back to the old days of conflict, war and everything. I mean, he reminds me of Hitler. That's the way he started speaking," Fox told CNN's Anderson Cooper in a phone interview on "Anderson Cooper 360."
"He has offended Mexico, Mexicans, (and) immigrants. He has offended the Pope. He has offended the Chinese. He's offended everybody."
Fox's comments come one day after he delivered a scathing response on Trump's plan to make Mexico pay for a wall between the Mexico-U.S. border.
"I'm not going to pay for that f***ing wall," Fox said in an interview with Fusion's Jorge Ramos.
Fox told Cooper he won't apologize for that remark.
Fox isn't the first to suggest Trump's rhetoric is similar to that of the German dictator.
Last month, Anne Frank's stepsister accused Trump of "acting like another Hitler." And in December, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman invoked Hitler when discussing Trump's plan to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the U.S.
"If you go and look at your history and you read your history in the lead-up to the Second World War, this is the kind of rhetoric that allowed Hitler to move forward," Whitman told CNN's Alisyn Camerota on "New Day."
“I have said that Mexico does not stop at its border, that wherever there is a Mexican, there is Mexico,” he said. “And, for this reason, the government action on behalf of our countrymen is guided by principles, for the defense and protection of their rights.”
This statement by former President Felipe Calderón evokes national socialism - e.g., the Sudetenland.
South African university buildings are burned down by students protesting: At least 3 universities shut down following student protests
South Africa’s North-West University is the latest institution to shut down indefinitely following an outbreak of violence.
At least three South African universities have been closed this week after a new wave of student protests that saw buildings torched over high tuition fees and allegations of racism.
At the North-West University’s Mafikeng campus, buildings were torched on Wednesday night, including a science centre and an administration building which held student records.
University spokesman Koos Degenaar said the trouble started after some students disrupted the inauguration of a new student council.
Defying a court order, a suspended student leader – part of a dissolved student council calling for the removal of Afrikaans as a teaching language – entered the university and addressed his supporters, the AP reports.
Private security officers reportedly tried to disperse the crowd using rubber bullets and tear gas as students threw stones at them.
President Jacob Zuma has condemned the violence saying “the burning of university buildings at a time when we are prioritising the education of our youth is inexplicable and can never be condoned.”
He added that “no amount of anger should drive students to burn their own university and deny themselves and others education. Grievances should be handled in a peaceful manner”.
Earlier this week, a protest at the University of Pretoria over the use of Afrikaans led to clashes between black and white students, also forcing the university to shut down.
University spokeswoman Anna-Retha Bouwer told the AFP “the university is currently meeting with various student bodies and stakeholders to address the issues affecting learning.”
Racial tension also flared up at the Free State University in Bloemfontein when a rugby match was interrupted earlier this week. The Free State is the heartland of Afrikaners.
Black protesters walked in a line across the pitch during the game, before hundreds of white spectators ran on and a mass brawl erupted.
US Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been heckled by two Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists during a fundraising event in South Carolina.
The interruption happened in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday night when two activists, one of whom named Ashley Williams, challenged Clinton on her past quotes regarding race.
"She called our boys ‘super-predators’ in '96, then she race-baited when running against Obama in '08, now she’s a lifelong civil rights activist. I just want to know which Hillary is running for President, the one from '96, '08, or the new Hillary?” she said.
As Clinton was speaking, Williams stood next to her holding a sign that read "We have to bring them to heel", quoting a statement Clinton made in 1996 about at-risk youth.
She then asked Clinton to apologize to black people for mass incarceration, adding that she's not a "super predator."
Williams and a colleague, whom she did not identify, reportedly contributed $500 to attend the Clinton event, which was held at a private residence and was attended by around 100 guests.
Williams was then thrown out of the event by the Secret Service.
According to Williams, speaking with The Huffington Post after the protest, "I wanted to bring her to confront her own words," adding, "We did this because we wanted to make sure that black people are paying attention to her record, and we want to know what Hillary we are getting."
She also said in a statement, "Hillary Clinton has a pattern of throwing the Black community under the bus when it serves her politically."
This isn't the first time Clinton has met opposition by activist groups during her campaign. In October 2015, protesters interrupted Clinton in Atlanta while she tried to roll out a plan for criminal justice reform.
The BLM movement was initiated in the aftermath of a range of US police killings of unarmed African Americans, raising nationwide debates about police violence and racial profiling.
We've achieved amazing things by using chemical rockets to place satellites in orbit, land people on the moon, and place rovers on the surface of Mars. We've even used ion drives to reach destinations further afield in our solar system. But reaching other stars, or reducing our travel time to Mars or other planets, will require another method of travel. One that can approach relativistic speeds.
We can execute missions to Mars, but it takes several months for a vehicle to reach the Red Planet. Even then, those missions have to be launched during the most optimal launch windows, which only occur every 2 years. But the minds at NASA never stop thinking about this problem, and now Dr. Philip Lubin, Physics Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, may have come up with something: photonic propulsion, which he thinks could reduce the travel time from Earth to Mars to just 3 days, for a 100 kg craft.
The system is called DEEP IN, or Directed Propulsion for Interstellar Exploration. The general idea is that we have achieved relativistic speeds in the laboratory, but haven't taken that technology—which is electromagnetic in nature, rather than chemical—and used it outside of the laboratory. In short, we can propel individual particles to near light speed inside particle accelerators, but haven't expanded that technology to the macro level.
Directed Energy Propulsion differs from rocket technology in a fundamental way: the propulsion system stays at home, and the craft doesn't carry any fuel or propellant. Instead, the craft would carry a system of reflectors, which would be struck with an aimed stream of photons, propelling the craft forward. And the whole system is modular and scalable.
If that's not tantalizing enough, the system can also be used to deflect hazardous space debris, and to detect other technological civilizations. As talked about in this paper, detecting these types of systems in use by other civilizations may be our best hope for discovering those civilizations.
There's a roadmap for using this system, and it starts small. At first, DEEP IN would be used to launch small cube satellites. The feedback from this phase would then inform the next step, which would be to test a unit for defending the ISS from space debris. From then, the systems would meet goals of increasing complexity, from launching satellites to LEO (Low-Earth Orbit) and GEO (Geostationary Orbit), all the way up to asteroid deflection and planetary defense. After that, relativistic drives capable of interstellar travel is the goal.
There are lots of questions still to be answered of course, like what happens when a vehicle at near light-speed hits a tiny meteorite. But those questions will be asked and answered as the system is developed and its capabilities grow.
Obviously, DEEP IN has the potential to bring other stars into reach. This system could deliver probes to some of the more promising exo-planets, and give humanity its first detailed look at other solar systems. If DEEP IN can be successfully scaled up, as Lubin says, then it will be a transformational technology.
Staring into space from an altitude of 5,100m in the Atacama desert, the Apex telescope has imaged as much of our galaxy as it can see.
It has sampled this vast, thin strip of the southern sky using radiation that sits between radio and infrared waves.
The detector is effectively a highly sensitive, super-chilled thermometer.
Tiny changes in temperature are registered by a bank of 295 sensors, kept at less than 0.3 degrees above absolute zero, called the Large Bolometer Camera (Laboca).
This instrument is at the heart of Apex - the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment - a 12m telescope that has been operating on Chile's high Chajnantor Plateau for 10 years.
The newly completed map, called Atlasgal (the Apex Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy), has already produced 70 scientific papers. Its first big tranche of data was released in 2009.
Today's release covers an area 140 degrees long and three degrees wide: more than four times the span of the previous iteration. It is also a much more precise, detailed map.
"Atlasgal provides exciting insights into where the next generation of high-mass stars and clusters form," said Timea Csengeri from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany.
The survey complements existing data on the northern Milky Way, collected by other telescopes. But the southern view of our galaxy is of particular interest because it includes the galactic centre.
It also means that promising regions of the map can be investigated in much greater depth by Alma, the powerful, 66-strong cluster of antennae that sits on the same plateau and also peers southwards.
The Atlasgal team has combined their data, based on radiation with a wavelength of 0.87mm, with measurements from two space telescopes: similar but lower-resolution images from Planck, and shorter-wavelength infrared data from Spitzer.
These different layers have been superimposed in a huge, downloadable image (displayed in part above) which shows the Atlasgal data in red, the Plank data in fainter red and the Spitzer measurements in blue.
"Atlasgal has allowed us to have a new and transformational look at the dense interstellar medium of our own galaxy, the Milky Way," said Leonardo Testi from the European Southern Observatory.
"The new release of the full survey opens up the possibility to mine this marvellous dataset for new discoveries. Many teams of scientists are already using the Atlasgal data to plan for detailed Alma follow-up."
Israeli Immigrant Absorption Minister Zeev Elkin, who accompanied Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a trip to Berlin on Monday, was scheduled to meet with German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere on Tuesday to discuss the current influx of migrants into Germany from Syria and North Africa.
The Germans have asked Elkin to present the Israeli model of "immigrant absorption" so that they can implement the relevant aspects domestically. Elkin remarked on Monday that the Israeli model includes methods of handling large waves of immigration and that despite the differences between the immigration to Israel and to Germany there are a lot of commonalities that can be studied and implemented.
According to assessments, about 1 million refugees have entered Germany recently. The Israeli immigrant absorption model proposes a one-year plan that also focuses on young men and women and families. The advantage of the Israeli model is that today, one Israeli ministry provides solutions to all immigrant issues including education, welfare, health, housing and government aid.
In addition, Israel’s Immigrant Absorption Ministry is offering to share with the German authorities the burden of documenting the migrants’ language studies, housing preferences, food requirements and job needs.
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Will ZOG-Germany force the "refugees" flooding into Germany to undergo DNA testing?
The Israeli State recently announced that it may begin to use genetic tests to determine whether potential immigrants are Jewish or not. This development would demand a rethinking of Israeli law on the issue of the definition of Jewishness. In this article, we discuss the historical and legal context of secular and religious definitions of Jewishness and rights to immigration in the State of Israel. We give a brief overview of different ways in which genes have been regarded as Jewish, and we discuss the relationship between this new use of genetics and the society with which it is co-produced. In conclusion, we raise several questions about future potential impacts of Jewish genetics on Israeli law and society.
Another 38 percent say they aren't sure, while just 24 percent say they are glad the Union won, the poll by Public Policy Polling released Tuesday finds.
Seventy percent of Trump backers also believe that the Confederate battle flag should still be flying over their state Capitol.
Lawmakers voted to take down the flag last summer following a mass shooting of parishioners at a black church in Charleston.
The poll also shows Trump's strong rhetoric on Islam resonating with his South Carolina supporters.
Eighty percent say they support his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country. Less than half — 44 percent — think that practicing Islam should even be allowed in the United States, while a third say it should be illegal.
Furthermore, 40 percent say they support shutting down all mosques in the country, compared to 36 percent who oppose the idea. Sixty-two percent want to create a national database of Muslim citizens.
The poll also showed that Trump has a 17-point lead in the state over his nearest GOP rivals, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who are tied at 18 percent.
In my correspondence regarding the events in Cologne, an editor of a Russian newspaper asked me a natural, but discouraging question; “Where were the German men?”, he inquired of me, perplexed.
Indeed, for us who grew up in Soviet Russia, it would be inconceivable that some drunk young people could publicly mock and harass girls on New Year’s Eve in the very center of Moscow or Saint Petersburg. If they dared to do this, they wouldn’t survive until the morning, they would become “martyrs” and would have their way with 72 virgins in a completely different realm.
Ethical codes, embedded in us on a genetic level, would demand that we intervene on behalf of the women. Especially, in a situation where normal adult men were more numerous than the rapists, and the rapists themselves were not terrorists, cyborgs or aliens, but mere street punks.
As it turned out in Germany, Sweden, Austria — these codes were fatally violated. A great number of strong healthy men, having heard the girls screaming and crying, and having seen the crimes being committed, didn’t do anything to save the victims. In rare cases, the girls were defended by migrants from Eastern Europe or Third World countries.
But this is only the first question in a long line of simple questions. We could expect that women, having learned about the abuse of girls the next day, would be in a fury. Since there is an inherent instinct in every normal woman to rescue a child or to protect a girl from an abuse, rape or harassment.
Again, genetic codes didn’t work.
We heard women blaming the victims and defending the rapists. We heard Henriette Reker, the mayor of Cologne, who claimed that “there’s always the possibility of keeping a certain distance of more than an arm’s length”; Claudia Roth from the Green Party, who accused an “organized mob” on the Internet of “calling for a hunt on non-white people”. We learned about dozens of female journalists who concealed the truth because the rapists were “refugees”. Feminists? We didn’t hear their voices. As we haven’t heard their voices in Sweden, Norway and England, where thousands of girls had long ago been turned into “white meat”.
Instead, all we hear is a subtle mumble, like that of the expert Irmgard Kopetzky, who states that “sexual violence is an issue for people of all ethnic origins”.“Figures show the majority of people carrying out sex attacks in Germany do not come from an immigrant background”, according to her.
Andrea den Boer, from the University of Kent, sees roots of the problem in that “the sex ratio alteration in the young adult population looking also to be abnormal at about 114 boys of that age for every 100 girls (SIC)”. Really?
In China, Armenia, Azerbaijan there are also many more boys than girls. Has anyone heard about something similar happening in Beijing, Erevan or Baku? Why, during the revolutions in Romania, Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, were there no cases of gang rape of girls during demonstrations, as it happened in Tahrir Square?
The wider Pandora’s box is opened, the more questions arise. What about politicians? Have any of them, left or right, called it the way they saw it? No.
“Sexual harassment is not automatically binding to migration and immigration,” Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven told in Davos. Sure! According to the report by Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (BRÅ) 20 years before, in 1996, the highest rates of rape convictions were for individuals born in North Africa and Iraq. They were convicted of rape at rates of 17.5 times the native Swedish rate respectively.
We are speaking about a commonplace situation, typical for the patriarchal Muslim world — for Iraqis, Afghans or Somalis — where a non-Muslim woman is nothing more than a sexual object, an easy and natural prey, a whore.
Coptic women in Egypt are constantly subject to harassment just because they are Christians. The Civil war in Lebanon took place not least because of the mass rape of Christian women by Palestinians. How much more for European women accustomed to their free dress code and not protected by families.
If “refugees” ever dared to do the same at home — in Algeria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia — with Muslim girls, they would be buried alive. There are strict and oppressive laws of clan vengeance and no one dares to harass a woman from another clan or tribe without bearing an inevitable cruel punishment. European women have no protection from their families or even the state, with the latter taking the side of the perpetrator. That is why they are doomed.
Why are western politicians paralyzed by fear? Why do only leaders of Eastern Europe dare to tell the truth, such as: Miloš Zeman and Bohuslav Sobotka, the President and Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán? The issue is not about right or left ideology. Zeman, Sobotka and Fico are Socialists. The issue is about a healthy, normal perception of the world based on genuine European values.
Why did it occur that they were the only leaders who could give both a courageous and adequate response to the reality of this situation? These small countries, squeezed between millstones of formerly great empires, having survived Soviet despotism, now know the value of freedom and dignity. They were vaccinated against universalist ideologies. Yet it is curious that Czech Republic and Slovakia are the only countries that accept genuine refugees facing a terrible fate — Christians and Yazidis from Iraq, but not mature and aggressive young men heading to Europe for an easy life and “white meat”.
What has happened to the world, when men, women, politicians, and the elite betray their daughters and children in order to please newcomers with their baser instincts and a cult of male power?
The answer is sad — the culture of postmodernism has managed to do what couldn’t be achieved even by the Communist propaganda machine. It has degraded the instinct of self-preservation, natural reactions embedded in humans on a genetic level, the ability to feel compassion and protect a victim – a woman, a girl, a child. An abstract ideology has suppressed the mind and senses.
I left USSR as a hater of Soviet totalitarianism. Now I realize that the cultural totalitarianism of political correctness has turned out to be much more poisonous.
The Soviet regime dictated harsh rules and established censorship. However people remained normal human beings. They laughed at authorities, composed jokes about Brezhnev, made satirical films in spite of the censorship, and learned to read newspapers between the lines. This primarily referred to the intelligentsia.
Cultural totalitarianism succeeded much more. It affirmed a relentless self-censorship, turned people into sterile zombies, and exterminated basic senses of responsibility and dignity. It changed the very nature of man, and indeed, it was a unique experiment on their own people.
… There is a small carnivorous animal in Siberia – a stoat. It hunts rabbits and hares, which are significantly heavier, faster and stronger. It doesn’t creep, doesn’t sit in ambush and doesn’t catch its prey on the run. It performs a hypnotic dance of death in front of it — with wriggles, acrobatic leaps and somersaults. The stoat dazzles the prey and, gradually approaching it, then it grabs its throat. The rabbit dies from shock. Why does the pray allow the stoat to dazzle and kill it without resisting? Biologists are unable to solve the riddle of the stoat’s hypnotic dance.
Western elites have foredoomed their own people by means of somersaults and acrobatic tricks with the same fate of the unfortunate rabbit. The hypnotic dance of death is gaining momentum…
Gravitational waves: breakthrough discovery after two centuries of expectation
Physicists have announced the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were first anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago.
“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo), at a press conference in Washington.
The announcement is the climax of a century of speculation, 50 years of trial and error, and 25 years perfecting a set of instruments so sensitive they could identify a distortion in spacetime a thousandth the diameter of one atomic nucleus across a 4km strip of laserbeam and mirror.
“For me the most exciting thing is we will literally be able to see the big bang seed."
The phenomenon detected was the collision of two black holes. Using the world’s most sophisticated detector, the scientists listened for 20 thousandths of a second as the two giant black holes, one 35 times the mass of the sun, the other slightly smaller, circled around each other.
At the beginning of the signal, their calculations told them how stars perish: the two objects had begun by circling each other 30 times a second. By the end of the 20 millisecond snatch of data, the two had accelerated to 250 times a second before the final collision and a dark, violent merger.
The observation signals the opening of a new window on to the universe.
“This is transformational,” said Prof Alberto Vecchio, of the University of Birmingham, and one of the researchers at Ligo. “We have observed the universe through light so far. But we can only see part of what happens in the universe. Gravitational waves carry completely different information about phenomena in the universe. So we have opened a new way of listening to a broadcasting channel which will allow us to discover phenomena we have never seen before,” he said.
“This observation is truly incredible science and marks three milestones for physics: the direct detection of gravitational waves, the first detection of a binary black hole, and the most convincing evidence to date that nature’s black holes are the objects predicted by Einstein’s theory.”
The scientists detected their cataclysmic event using an instrument so sensitive it could detect a change in the distance between the solar system and the nearest star four light years away to the thickness of a human hair.
And they did so within weeks of turning on their new, upgraded instrument: it took just 20 milliseconds to catch the merger of two black holes, at a distance of 1.3 billion light years, somewhere beyond the Large Magellanic Cloud in the southern hemisphere sky, but it then took months of meticulous checking of the signal against all the complex computer simulations of black hole collision to make sure the evidence matched the theoretical template.
The detector was switched off in January for a further upgrade: astronomers still have to decipher months of material collected in the interval. But – given half a century of frustration in the search for gravitational waves – what they found exceeded expectation: suddenly, in the mutual collapse of two black holes, they could eavesdrop on the violence of the universe.
Prof B S Sathyaprakash, from Cardiff University’s school of physics and astronomy, said: “The shock would have released more energy than the light from all the stars in the universe for that brief instant. The fusion of two black holes which created this event had been predicted but never observed.”
The finding completed the scientific arc of prediction, discovery and confirmation: first they calculated what they should be able to detect, then decided what the evidence should look like, and then devised the experiment that clinched the matter. Which is why on Thursday scientists around the world were able to hail the announcement as yet another confirmation of their “standard model” of the cosmos, and the beginning of a new era of discovery.
Astronomers have already exploited visible light, the infrared and ultraviolet, radio waves, x-rays and even gamma-rays in their attempt to understand the mechanics of stars, the evolution of the galaxies and the expansion of the universe from an initial big bang seed 13.8 billion years ago.
Unequivocal
Thursday’s announcement was the unequivocal first detection ever of gravity waves. The hope is that gravity wave astronomy could start to answer questions not just about the life of stars but their deaths as well: death by collision, death in a black hole, death in some rare stellar catastrophe so fierce that, for a few thousandths of a second, the blast is the brightest thing in the universe.
Even before the Ligo detectors in two US states reopened for business late last year, researchers were confident that a detection would follow swiftly. The announcement came after months of speculation, and decades of theoretical and practical work by an international network of more than a thousand scientists and engineers in Britain, Europe, the US and around the world.
Professor Kip Thorne, of the California Institute of Technology, and one of the founding fathers of Ligo, said that until now, astronomers had looked at the universe as if on a calm sea. All of that had changed.
“The colliding black holes that produced these gravitational waves created a violent storm in the fabric of space and time, a storm in which time speeded up and slowed down, and speeded up again, a storm in which the shape of space was bent in this way and that way,” he said.
Prof Neil Turok, director the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics at Waterloo in Canada, and a former research colleague of Prof Stephen Hawking, called the discovery “the real deal, one of those breakthrough moments in science”.
Not only had the detector picked up the collision of two enormous black holes across a distance of almost a billion light years of space, it recorded the distinctive “chirp” as the two spiralled towards each other.
The discovery, he said, completes a scientific arc of wonder that began 200 years ago, when the great British scientist Michael Faraday began to puzzle about how action was transmitted across the distance of space; how the sun pulled the Earth around. If the sun moved 10 yards, very suddenly, would the Earth feel the difference?
He reasoned that something must cross space to transmit the force of gravity. Faraday’s reasoning inspired the great British mathematician James Clerk Maxwell to think about how an electric force travelled, and arrive at an understanding of light and a prediction of radio waves.
“Einstein, when he came to write down his theory of gravity, his two heroes were Faraday and Maxwell,” said Turok. “He tried to write down laws of the gravitational field and he wasn’t in the least surprised to discover that his predictions had waves, gravitational waves.”
The Ligo discovery signals a new era in astronomy, he said.
“Just think of radio waves, when radio waves were discovered we learned to communicate with them. Mobile communication is entirely reliant on radio waves. For astronomy, radio observations have probably told us more than anything else about the structure of the universe. Now we have gravitational waves we are going to have a whole new picture of the universe, of the stuff that doesn’t emit light – dark matter, black holes,” he said.
“For me the most exciting thing is we will literally be able to see the big bang seed. Using electromagnetic waves we cannot see further back than 400,000 years after the big bang seed. The early universe was opaque to light. It is not opaque to gravitational waves. It is completely transparent.
“So literally, by gathering gravitational waves we will be able to see exactly what happened at the initial singularity. The most weird and wonderful prediction of Einstein’s theory was that everything came out of a single event: the big bang seed singularity. And we will be able to see what happened.”
US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has lambasted German Chancellor Angela Merkel for admitting hundreds of thousands of migrants, saying this could be “the end of Europe.” He also said America could have “very good relations” with Russia.
The real estate billionaire was speaking to the French conservative magazine Valeurs Actuelles, saying the German chancellor had made “a tragic mistake with the migrants.”
"If you don't treat the situation competently and firmly, yes, it's the end of Europe. You could face real revolutions," Trump was quoted as saying, as cited by Reuters.
Merkel’s approval ratings have taken a nosedive and she has also received criticism from within her ruling coalition for her ‘open-door’ refugee and migrant policy, which saw an estimated 1.1 million asylum seekers arrive in Germany in 2015. Germany’s Economics Minister Gerd Muller stated in January that an estimated 8-10 million refugees could try to enter Europe over the coming years.
In a message that would certainly appease the influential pressure group the National Rifle Association, Trump was highly critical of France’s strict gun laws, which he says played a part in the killing of dozens of people at the Bataclan Theater on November 13 by Islamist militant gunmen.
"I always have a gun with me. Had I been at the Bataclan, I can tell you I would have opened fire," he said.
Continuing his anti-migrant theme, the 69-year-old mentioned that some neighborhoods in Paris had become no-go areas, while the Belgian capital, Brussels, had become “a breeding ground for terrorists.”
In December, Trump suggested that all Muslims should be barred from entering the US until the authorities “figure out what’s going on here” in the wake of the San Bernardino shootings in California on December 2, which killed 16 people.
However, the Republican presidential contender had kinder words concerning ties with Russia, with Trump saying that Washington could have very good relations with President Vladimir Putin. He also noted that nothing could be worse than the present situation where President Barack Obama and Putin hardly speak with one another.
"[Putin] said I was brilliant. That proves a certain smartness," said Trump.
Putin praised Trump during his traditional end of the year Question and Answer session with journalists on December 17. He described the property tycoon as the “absolute front-runner in the presidential race.” However, he stressed that he would be ready to work with whoever becomes the next US president.
"He is a very flamboyant man, very talented, no doubt about that... He is the absolute leader of the presidential race, as we see it today. He says that he wants to move to another level of relations, to a deeper level of relations with Russia. How can we not welcome that? Of course we welcome it," Putin said.
Trump responded by saying it was a “great honor” to receive praise from a “highly-respected” leader like Putin, while adding that if he is elected as the new US president, he would like to work with Russia.
“I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect,” he reiterated on December 18.
Threat: This picture was published in ISIS's own French-language magazine Dar al-Islam, with the caption roughly translating to: 'A gathering of those who idolise Front National. First choice of targets'
ISIS has declared war on the French pro-White party National Front naming them their 'prime target' in an attack on France.
The Islamist terrorist organisation said it was not a question of 'if' they would attack France, but 'how and when'.
The threats against France and National Front were made in the latest issue of ISIS's French-language propaganda magazine: Dar al-Islam
Dar al-Islam is a French-language magazine produced by ISIS, designed to encourage more people to travel to areas controlled by the terrorists in Syria and Iraq.
The latest issue of the magazine includes a picture of a National Front demonstration naming the party and its supporters ISIS's prime targets.
Targets: In addition to naming Front National their 'prime targets', ISIS said it was not a question of 'if' they would attack France, but 'how and when'
'The question isn't whether France will get attacked again, it's how they will be attacked and when,' the magazine said, The Local reports.
The threat was picket up by French Islamist expert Romain Caillet, who tweeted: 'For the first time, National Front demonstrations are presented as targets in an official document from ISIS.'
National Front is a pro-White party which has grown in popularity in recent years under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, who took over from her father, party founder Jean-Marie, in 2011.
However, her popularity may be about to take a hit as she is being questioned by fraud officials over the alleged embezzlement of millions of euros by National Front party.
The pro-White National Front has grown in popularity in recent years under the leadership of 47-year-old Marine Le Pen, who took over from her father, Jean-Marie, in 2011
Le Pen, 47, was reportedly questioned for several hours last week, after twice previously having refused to appear before judges investigating the party's finances.
The National Front and several of the party's high-ranking members have been charged with misuse of company assets and conspiracy to commit fraud over the financing of parliamentary and presidential elections in 2012.
Le Pen, who is aiming to run in the 2017 presidential election, is also under investigation for tweeting graphic images of Islamic State atrocities, including the beheading of US reporter James Foley.
Germany's pro-White movement, led by the rising anti-invasion Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, is using language similar to that deployed by Hitler's Nazis, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said on Friday.
Support for the AfD has jumped amid deepening public unease over Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door policy for invaders after some 1.1 million migrants came to Germany last year.
"Those who accuse democratically elected politicians of treason, call them 'parties of the system' and menace journalists as 'lying press' - they are very close to the language of the enemies of democracy, the Nazis of the '20s and '30s," Gabriel said.
He was speaking in Berlin at an event to promote integration - the hot popular issue in Germany. Concern over the refugee influx has hurt support for Merkel and fuelled the AfD's rise.
The AfD has grown in tandem with support for other far-right groups, such as the anti-Islam PEGIDA movement, which has held regular rallies in protest at the increase in refugee numbers.
Last year, dozens of protesters shouted at Merkel and waved placards with the slogan "traitor" - adopted by PEGIDA - when she visited an eastern German town where anti-refugee protests had erupted into violence.
Gabriel said on Sunday Germany's domestic intelligence agency (BfV) should monitor the AfD after the party's leader, Frauke Petry, suggested that German police be given powers to use firearms against illegal migrants.
"There is a political force that is trying to develop itself into the parliamentary arm of these racist arguments," Gabriel said on Friday, with reference to an increased number of attacks on foreigners in Germany.
A poll on Wednesday showed support for the AfD up three points at 12 percent, cementing its position as Germany's third largest party, behind Merkel's conservatives and Gabriel's Social Democrats, who govern in a coalition.
Matteo Salvini embraces Lepenism to rebuild Northern League.
ROME — When Matteo Salvini took over the leadership of the Northern League at the end of 2013, Italian politicians and the media said his job would be to officiate at the party’s funeral. Two years later, it is back from the near dead — and stronger than ever.
Whether you credit the refugee crisis, the Marine Le Pen bandwagon or what party insiders prefer to call the #effettoSalvini (the Salvini effect), the party that sank to an historic low of 4 percent in the 2013 election — below the threshold for seats in the Senate — now has 16-17 percent support in nationwide polls.
That means if an election took place tomorrow — always a risk in Italy, even though Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is only halfway through his four-year term — the League could team up with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, which gets 11 percent in the same polls, and the small, right-wing Fratelli d’Italia (5 percent) to put together a possible ruling coalition.
Renzi’s center-left Democratic Party (PD) stands at 30.8 percent in polls, but may lack natural allies to be able to stay in power. The 5-Star Movement is at 27.6 percent, but there is virtually zero chance that its leader, the comedian-turned-politician Beppe Grillo, would risk his anti-establishment credentials by helping Renzi stay in power.
“We are creating an alternative coalition to Renzi, one not limited to the center-right. I think categories of Right and Left are a little outdated — especially since Renzi has very little of the Left,” Salvini said in an interview.
The party’s aim is to build support from Italians “who don’t recognize themselves in Renzi or the 5-Star Movement,” added Massimiliano Fedriga, a League leader in the lower house of parliament.
Under the slogan Roma ladrona (Thieving Rome), it denounced the central government and party apparatus, in much the same way as today’s nationalist Euroskeptics, like Le Pen’s National Front, campaign against the EU bureaucracy in Brussels.
Teaming up with the Milanese media tycoon Berlusconi, the League became a player in national politics — albeit a fickle partner for Berlusconi — before the Bossi clan’s leadership was subsumed by corruption scandals.
Nothing illustrates how much the League has changed, and evolved into a serious threat to Renzi, like its recent successes beyond Padania. While there have been occasional southern offshoots before, like a Northern League deputy mayor on the island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean, under Salvini’s leadership the party has challenged Renzi on his home turf in Tuscany.
In regional elections last May, the League took 20 percent of the vote in Tuscany, a traditional leftist stronghold. This was a personal affront for the prime minister, who rose to political prominence as mayor of the regional capital city Florence.
“Tuscany is the proof that the days are over when we were labeled as a crazy far-right party,” said 42-year-old Salvini, who joined the League at the age of 17 and quickly styled himself the “dauphin.” Elected to the European Parliament in 2004, he eventually challenged the ailing Bossi for the leadership in 2013, winning 80 percent of party delegates’ votes.
Sporting a diamond earring in the green livery of the Northern League and picking fights with the prime minister at every opportunity, Salvini has some things in common with Renzi: Both portray themselves as “new blood” in party politics and both are eager for publicity, be it talk shows, social media or glossy magazines. Renzi has appeared dressed as Fonzie from the TV series “Happy Days,” while Salvini appeared on one cover wearing absolutely nothing but a green Northern League tie.
The secret of the League’s new-found success, according to Tarchi, lies in “its competitors’ total neglect of issues that are deeply important to a significant proportion of the electorate, especially the less wealthy ones.”
Its captive vote includes “those who would like to stop the spread of a progressive and cosmopolitan worldview; those who feel uncomfortable with multi-ethnicity and with living with foreigners, as well as homosexual unions,” said Tarchi.
Fedriga, the League MP, gives the example of defending Italian pensioners: once the domain of the Left, he said, parties like the PD are “too busy to care about it.”
For political scientist Ilvo Diamanti, the League owes its revival to what he calls Lepenism — “the leverage on nationalism that responds to the fears generated by the economic crisis and global insecurity and in parallel, the growing pressure of migration.”
Salvini opposes same-sex marriage (as do many centrist and conservative Catholics in Italy). He criticized Pope Francis when the Catholic leader promoted dialogue with Muslims.
He once called Renzi an “accomplice” in what he portrays as an invasion by illegal immigrants, citing the prime minister’s opposition to closing Italy’s borders and suspending the EU’s passport-free Schengen area. On membership of the European Union, Salvini says he is “envious of the Brits who will decide in a referendum whether to leave the EU or not.”
Salvini, who has called Europe a failed experiment and the euro a crime against humanity, shares some rhetorical common ground with Renzi, who is currently battling with Brussels and EU leaders over the cost of dealing with the refugee crisis as well as other issues.
“If Renzi wants to form a common front against Brussels, the Northern League is willing to be his ally,” Salvini told POLITICO, outlining a vision of a Europe that “does a few things but does them well — that deals with immigration and foreign policy but not with agriculture, and does not grant membership to Albania, Kosovo and Turkey.”
Such sentiment aligns the League closely with Le Pen’s National Front and other pro-White European parties, who last week gathered in Milan for a conference, hosted by Salvini, of a new group in the European Parliament, the Europe of Nations and Freedom. Its 38 MEPs from groups such as the National Front, the Dutch and Austrian Freedom Parties and Belgium’s Vlaams Belang see the refugee crisis and related security concerns as an opportunity to move from the political fringe to real power.
“The Le Pen-Salvini axis is a powerful one, both in political and media terms,” said Marco Centinaio, the Northern League’s leader in the Italian Senate.
During the meeting, Salvini posted a selfie on Facebook with pro-White leaders including Le Pen and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders with the caption: “We will not surrender to the clandestine invasion.”
The Israeli government refuses to name the third countries involved in the deals, but the BBC has spoken to people who say they were sent to Rwanda and Uganda.
For nearly a year Israel has been offering African migrants cash and the chance to go and live in what is supposed to be a safe haven in a third country - but the BBC has spoken to two men who say that they were abandoned as soon as they got off the plane. One was immediately trafficked, the other left to fend for himself without papers.
Adam was 18 when he arrived in Israel in 2011. Attackers had burned down his home in Darfur at the height of the genocide, and he had spent his teenage years in a UN refugee camp in another part of Sudan. With no prospects in the camp and no sign of an end to the conflict in Darfur, he made his way north through Egypt and the lawless Sinai peninsula to Israel.
But Israel - which has approved fewer than 1% of asylum applications since it signed the UN Refugee Convention six decades ago - has not offered asylum to a single person from Sudan. It turned down Adam's application, and last October, when he went to renew the temporary permit allowing him to stay in the country, he was summoned to a detention centre known as Holot, deep in the Negev desert.
Adam is from Sudan and now lives in the Holot detention centre
This was no surprise for Adam. As most Sudanese and Eritreans in Israel know, it's just a matter of time before they get the call to Holot.
The government calls Holot an "open-stay centre", but it's run by the prison service and rules are strict, including a night-time curfew, which, if broken, will land you in jail.
It's in such an isolated area that there's very little to do and nowhere to go.
I talked to Adam and a group of his friends just outside the gates of Holot, where, at that time, they spent most of their day playing cards or snooker, and eating and cooking in makeshift restaurants.
They told me they took turns to make the hour-long bus ride into the nearest town, Beersheva, where they bought food. The meals served in Holot were insufficient, they said, and contained little meat or protein.
Most of the men there were young - in their 20s or early 30s. Some had been teachers, activists or students in their own countries.
"We are wasting our youth here," Adam says. "If someone lives in Holot, they have no future... You find many people here go crazy."
Since I visited Holot, those makeshift restaurants and game areas have all been demolished on the orders of the government, leaving those inside with even fewer ways to pass the time.
Adam will be held in Holot for 12 months. Then he is likely to face a stark choice:
Go home to Sudan
Stay in Israel, but be imprisoned indefinitely
Accept departure to a third country
The Israeli government has deals with two countries in Africa to host its unwanted migrants.
It promises that people who take the option of "voluntary departure to third countries" will receive papers on arrival that give them legal status in the country.
As an extra incentive, they're given $3,500 (£2,435) in cash, handed over in the departure lounge of the airport in Tel Aviv.
Israel refuses to name the two African countries but the BBC has spoken to migrants who say they were sent to Rwanda and Uganda.
One is Tesfay, an Eritrean who was flown to Rwanda in March 2015, and he told me that far from being offered legal status, a home and the chance of a job in Rwanda - as he had been promised in Israel - he became a victim of trafficking.
His identity papers - a travel document and a single-entry visa to Rwanda, both issued in Israel - were immediately confiscated at Kigali airport, he says.
Then, along with nine other Eritreans, he was taken to a "guest house". None of them was allowed out. It would be dangerous without papers, they were told. Then, two days after arriving, the men were told it was time to leave.
"You are going to Uganda. But before you go, you need to pay $150," said a man who introduced himself as John. "Then from the border to Kampala you need to pay again."
Crammed into a minibus, they made the six-hour journey to the Ugandan border, where they were told to get out of the bus.
"When we crossed the border, that's when I understood that we were being smuggled," Tesfay says. "We went on foot, silently. We were being smuggled from one state to another."
As promised by "John", they had to pay another $150 to continue their journey to the Ugandan capital, Kampala.
But inevitably, having entered as illegal immigrants, they were arrested on arrival and put behind bars - after police had relieved them of about half the cash in their pockets, Tesfay says.
With what was left, Tesfay managed to post bail. He was due to appear in court five days later and having already been warned he was likely to be deported to Eritrea - the repressive authoritarian state he had fled in the first place - he decided to take no chances. He paid another smuggler to get him into Kenya, where he is now seeking asylum.
Rwanda has never confirmed that it struck a deal to host Israel's unwanted migrants. The Ugandan government, for its part, has denied outright that such a deal exists - it told the BBC it was investigating how migrants who claimed to have been sent from Israel were entering the country.
The BBC spoke to a man from Darfur who said he was flown to Uganda from Israel with seven others in 2014, before the third country policy became official.
For safety reasons, he asked to remain anonymous.
"None of the things I was promised were given to me," he said. "No documents, no passport, no assistance - nothing. (Israel) just wants to take people and dump them."
In October, Israeli immigration authorities said 3,000 asylum seekers had left Israel for a third country. But the BBC has learned that only seven have registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Rwanda, all of them Eritreans, and only eight, mostly from Sudan, in Uganda.
Meanwhile, there are about 45,000 Eritreans and Sudanese in Israel. The government won't deport them - that would be a clear breach of the UN Refugee Convention, which it signed in 1954. Under the Convention, no-one can be forcibly returned to a country where they have a justified fear of persecution.
But if Israel treats them as refugees at least in this respect, why does it then refuse them asylum?
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Emmanuel Nahshon says the migrants threaten the security, and the identity, of the Jewish state.
"It's obvious that we live here in a situation which is rather complex and complicated. And if you add this element of migrants who come here and who want to stay here - undoubtedly because this is a rich and prosperous country - then it could become also a challenge to our identity here in Israel.
"It's not only about the 45,000 or 50,000 people that already are here in Israel, it's about the potential. Because those people tell their friends and families back home - 'Look, this is a very nice place. Do come over.'"
And, of course, in Israel there is also the ever present issue of security.
"Open borders through which migrants can pass mean also open borders through which terror organisations can penetrate Israeli territory and commit terror acts," Nahshon says.
But lawyers fighting against the Third Country policy in Israel's Supreme Court argue that the country is in breach of its obligations under the UN Refugee Convention.
"[Migrants] are stigmatised as 'infiltrators' and then have their asylum application adjudicated in sort of a conveyor-belt system which rejects everyone," says one of the lawyers, Anat Ben-Dor.
"And then the whole idea of asking them to give their 'voluntary' consent to something they do not know because this is a secret arrangement... Of course this is not voluntary because you are using the threat of putting them indefinitely in prison if they refuse to go.
"And then when they land in one of those two countries the lack of proper monitoring cannot really secure, in the necessary certainty, that those people would not end up either without [legal] status, or in prison, or - worst of all - being returned to places where they would face danger."
Sigal Rozen, from the Israeli human rights group Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, says that the failure by Israel to guarantee the migrants' security in Rwanda and Uganda means they are forced to risk their lives elsewhere.
"Some of them continue to South Sudan, others to Kenya, to Ethiopia, and many end up in Europe after they take the route through Libya and Italy. Unfortunately many others die on the way and we never hear from them again," she says.
There's a joke among the migrants, she says, that the Israeli government's departing "gift" of $3,500 is just enough money to get to Europe.
But the Israeli government is adamant that it's acting within the framework of international law and is offering a fair deal to the migrants.
But in Tesfay's opinion, he did not get a fair deal.
"The Israeli authority - it's not what they promised. I have no safety - I have no protection at all," he says.
The risk is that Adam and the other residents of Holot will experience exactly the same thing when they arrive in Africa.
