Housing Minister Yoav Galant calls for the assassination of Syrian President Bashar Assad at a conference in Latrun, near Jerusalem, on May 16, 2017. (Miriam Tzachi/Office of Yoav Gallant).

Times of Israel, “Israeli minister: ‘The time has come’ to kill Bashar Assad”, 16 May 2017:

An Israeli minister called for the assassination of Syrian President Bashar Assad on Tuesday, saying he “does not have a place in this world.”

Yoav Galant says revelation the Syrian president is executing prisoners and burning their bodies ‘crosses a red line.’

Speaking at a conference outside Jerusalem, Housing and Construction Minister Yoav Galant, a retired IDF general, said that in light of recent allegations that Assad’s regime carried out mass executions and burned the bodies of the victims, he had to be killed.

“The reality of the situation in Syria is that they are executing people, using directed chemical attacks against them, and the latest extreme — burning their corpses, something we haven’t seen in 70 years,” Galant said, in a reference to the Holocaust.

The minister said Assad’s actions in Syria amount to nothing less than a “genocide,” with “hundreds of thousands killed.”

On Monday, the United States State Department accused the Assad regime of carrying out mass killings of thousands of prisoners and burning the bodies in a large crematorium outside the capital.

“In my view, we are crossing a red line. And in my view, the time has come to assassinate Assad. It’s as simple as that,” said Galant, who previously served as the head of the IDF’s Southern Command.

Galant likened the assassination of Assad to cutting off the “tail of the snake.” After that, he said, “we can focus on the head, which is in Tehran.

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Massively botted to cover-up Trump’s tactless disclosure to Lavrov and firing of Comey, the Seth Rich story is more of a non-story than many people realize; nevertheless, it has been massively botted (probably through Russia) to distract and obfuscate:

- Trump’s tactless disclosure to Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, that the Mossad has infiltrators among Isil. While ethno-nationalists should be grateful for this tactless implication of the Mossad and Israel, it is not necessarily a feather in Trump’s genius cap and he and his proponents would naturally want to distract from that fact.

- Trump’s tactlessly clear motives in his firing of FBI director James Comey. Again, while we ethno-nationalists might be happy that he is exposing himself to be a disingenuous/naive oaf with regard to issues and inquiries touching upon the Russian Federation, it would not necessarily be in his interest to have a great deal of attention paid to that perception.

Trump’s motives were exposed when firing Comey by tactlessly expressing ‘gratitude’ to Comey for having “assured him ‘three times’ that he was not under FBI investigation.” Moreover, Trump’s motivation to obstruct further inquiry by Comey into his (Trump’s) ties to Russia were exposed by his opposition to Comey’s investigation into Flynn’s Russian ties:

Vice, 16 May, “Trump asked Comey to drop investigation into Flynn.”  [...]  “A source told CNN that Trump’s request so appalled Comey, he felt compelled to document it.”

Reuters, 18 May: U.S. President Donald Trump asked then-FBI Director James Comey to end the agency’s investigation into ties between former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn and Russia, according to a source who has seen a memo written by Comey.

The explosive new development on Tuesday followed a week of tumult at the White House after Trump fired Comey and then discussed sensitive national security information about Islamic State with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The Comey memo, first reported by the New York Times, caused alarm on Capitol Hill and raised questions about whether Trump tried to interfere with a federal investigation

..Tillerson is another elephant in the room.

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The poster’s punchline reads “FPÖ—otherwise nothing will ever change.” The FPÖ will also produce material mapping out the numerous false promises made by the SPÖ and ÖVP, and will concentrate on mapping its own major policies which include “zero tolerance of Islamism,” the protection of women’s rights, fighting welfare abuse, protectionism for Austrian workers, and the immediate “deportation of asylum seekers and criminal immigrants.”

New Observer, “October Elections in Austria as Coalition Implodes”, 17 May 2017:

The collapse of the ruling conservative-socialist Austrian coalition government has meant that Austria will have a snap general election on October 15—possibly opening the door to power for the anti-invasion Freedom Party (FPÖ).

The ruling coalition, made up of Chancellor Christian Kern’s Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) and the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) was supposed to govern until its term ran out in 2018.

However, the growth of the FPÖ—and the collapse of the SPÖ and ÖVP votes in last year’s presidential elections, combined with internal fighting over leadership and policy toward the mass nonwhite fake refugee invasion, has finally caused the coalition to break apart.

The sudden resignation of ÖVP leader—and deputy chancellor—Reinhold Mitterlehner, from all his posts, brought the crisis to a head.

Mitterlehner complained that he was unable to continue because of infighting within his party, and therefore had no choice but to lay down his leadership and his deputy chancellorship.

The ÖVP moved quickly to replace him with the current foreign minister, the 30-year-old Sebastian Kurz, widely punted by the controlled media as a “dynamic” leader who could restore that party’s fortunes.

Rather than try and carry on with the increasingly impossible coalition, Kurz however immediately called time on the coalition and announced that he would be withdrawing his party’s support from the government.

The FPÖ is currently the single largest party with over 30 percent of the vote, but the presidential elections of last year saw its vote climb to 49 percent.

The chances are therefore extremely good that the FPÖ will emerge as the single largest party—and given recent developments, it may well consider a coalition government with the ÖVP.

[...]

The FPÖ campaign will start in Vienna on May 18, by which time 500,000 copies of the initial material will have been printed.

Olguţa Vasilescu warns multinationals of potential ‘social-patriot shift’ in Romania.

Visigrad, “Olguţa Vasilescu warns multinationals of genesis and potential of ‘social-patriot shift’ in Romania”, 12 May 2017:

Romania – Currently mayor of Craiova (Oltenia) under the aegis of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and as Minister of Labor, Family and Social Protection in the Grindeanu (PSD / ALDE) government, at 43 years of age, Olguţa Vasilescu, in a context of feminization of the European political elites, could well embody the Romanian version of the new social / Eurosceptic paradigm embodied elsewhere by women such as Marine Le Pen or Sarah Wagenknecht. Herself Oltenian (Oltenia being a sort of Romanian Midwest, where the population – though impoverished – is the most ethnically homogeneous in all the country), this woman, still young, of typical Romanian beauty and elegance is – to say the least – daring. As Minister of Labor, her name is closely attached to the drastic wage increases recently enjoyed by Romanian civil service workers, as part of a heterodox policy of stimulating demand, a policy which draws literal screams from the Romanian and European neo-liberal “elite”.

A member of the Greater Romania Party until the end of 2007, she then left this nationalist party, which had largely run its course. [Nearly twenty years after the murder of the Ceauşescus, this protest party, with no real program apart from a certain chauvinism (of which the Hungarian minority often paid the price) and nostalgia for N. Ceauşescu’s national-communism, withered by its lack of adaptation to the new socio-cultural and geopolitical realities of Central Europe, and also suffered from the excessive influence exerted by its charismatic and rather dictatorial leader, C. Vadim Tudor (who died in 2015). A cultivated poet and fine orator (comparable in many respects to his Hungarian counterpart: the nationalist dramatist and tribunist I. Csurka, who himself died at roughly the same time), but exhausted by scandals, Vadim Tudor had allowed Romanian nationalism to transform into a generational folklore too tightly bound to an electoral base of retirees who were (rightly) nostalgic for the period between 1970-1989 (probably the only period of true independence and wide-spread upward social mobility that modern Romania has known), seemingly condemned to follow this base to the grave.]

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Visigrad Post, “The Three Seas Initiative: Strengthening Cooperation in Central and Eastern Europe”, 13 May 2017:

By Olivier Bault.

Poland, Helenów – Pressed between Moscow’s energy and military pressure in the east, and the economic and ideological pressure of Brussels, Berlin and Paris to the west, twelve Central and Eastern European countries are taking part in the Three Seas Initiative (The Adriatic, Baltic and the Black Sea) aimed at strengthening regional cooperation and infrastructure in the fields of transport, telecommunications, energy and the environment. On 4 May, Polish President Andrzej Duda’s Head of Cabinet met the foreign advisors of the Presidents of the Three Seas countries near Warsaw: the Visegrád Group countries (V4: Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary), the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), as well as Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Croatia. The aim was to prepare for the summit which is to be held by these countries in Wrocław, in southwestern Poland, next July, after last year’s Dubrovnik summit in Croatia.

The message that the participating countries want to spread, according to Andrzej Duda’s Chief of Cabinet, however, goes in the direction of integration and solidarity with the European Union as a whole. With regard to infrastructure, this includes strengthening the previously neglected North-South links rather than the West-East links.

The Three Seas Initiative has been at the center of Polish foreign policy since the Conservatives (PiS) came to power in Warsaw. Already between the two World Wars, Poland had dreamed of a great “Międzymorze” Federation of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe to resist together the supremacy of Soviet Russia and Germany. If this project derived its inspiration from the history of the Republic of the Two Nations, the union of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania which extended to its peak (around 1600) from the Baltic to the Black Sea, geopolitics of the 1920s and 1930s did not make it possible to realize it. Polish President Andrzej Duda, elected in 2015, re-launched the idea, this time in the framework of enhanced cooperation within the European Union, with Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic.

It is unclear whether US President Donald Trump will attend the Wrocław summit but he has been invited.

Translated from French by the Visegrád Post.

Visigrad Post, “The indisputable success of the Hungarian border fence”, 15 May 2017:

Hungary – The second fence on the southern border of Hungary is complete. Hungary is now endowed with the most monitored border in Europe, whose effectiveness is indisputable.

Along the 155 km of the border with Serbia, the anti-migrant barrier has been reinforced with a second fence, motion detection systems and thermal cameras, and an asphalted road between the two fences. It took about 15 million euros to erect this second barrier. The cost of mobilizing soldiers and policemen at the border has not yet been established, but the results are there: since 28 March, no one has been able to cross the border illegally.

If, however, anyone succeeds in passing, it is unlikely that they will continue their journey. Any clandestine intercepted in Hungary is taken back to the crossing point of the southern border, to the Serbian side. They are recorded as illegals and are no longer able to file asylum applications.

Prevention is better than cure

This could be the watchword of the government, which, in erecting this reinforced barrier, complied to the urgent demand of Mayor László Toroczkai, vice-president of the right-wing populist Jobbik party, and also mayor of Ásotthalom, a town along the Serbian border that gained worldwide infamy after his viral video aimed at discouraging migrants from passing by his place.

“I asked for the barrier in 2014. From its construction in 2015, the results were very convincing,” the Hungarian local official told to the Visegrád Post. “The double barrier was and is necessary, as is the strong police presence on the ground, as no barrier completely deters those who want to cross. This Monday, police discovered a 1-kilometer long tunnel made by smugglers … ” The government maintains that the barrier was all the more necessary as the wave of immigration of 2015 would be only the first of a potential long series.

Erdogan’s recurring threats to the European Union, in particular, and the millions of Africans waiting in Libya are pushing the Hungarian government to believe that the pressure on its southern border is only temporarily low, and the Hungarian authorities are now on a permanent war footing to deal with the migratory waves.

A vision shared by László Toroczkai, who commented during our phone call that “this barrier and the means to curb mass immigration will not just be necessary in the years to come, but also in the coming centuries.”

Henderson Island has long been regarded as one of the most remote and pristine islands in the world, but trash washing up on shore is turning it into a landfill. - J. Lavers 2015

Popular Science, “This remote island in the South Pacific is covered in 18 tons of our trash”, 15 May 2017:

Paradise lost

Henderson Island has long been regarded as one of the most remote and pristine islands in the world, but trash washing up on shore is turning it into a landfill.

Traveling by ship, it takes about 13 days to reach Henderson Island from New Zealand. Hidden in the South Pacific, 3000 miles from anywhere, this UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Pitcairns is “one of the most pristine islands left in the world, never inhabited by humans, rarely visited even for research purposes,” says Jennifer Lavers.

Hundreds of crabs, like this one photographed on Henderson Island, now make their homes out of plastic debris. J. Lavers 2015

After she and her colleagues disembarked on Henderson Island in May 2015 to do some ecology research, they didn’t see another ship until they got picked up at the end of August. But even though humans rarely touch the island, our fingerprints are all over it: during their stay, Lavers and her fellow researchers found that this remote island is home not only to endangered petrels and nesting sea turtles, but approximately 37,661,395 pieces of manmade trash.

Their findings are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. After digging up a startling amount of garbage during their beach survey, Lavers (a marine ecotoxicologist from the University of Tasmania) and Alexander Bond (a conservation scientist from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) concluded that this remote island has the highest density of trash ever reported in nature.

By their calculations, Henderson is littered with at least 17.6 tons of (mostly plastic) trash—and every square meter of the beach gets around 27 new pieces of junk added to its collection every day.

David Barnes, a marine ecologist who studies plastic pollution at the British Antarctic Survey, calls this number ‘pretty scary.’ “In less than a century, plastic has made a world of difference in so many ways. We may spend centuries undoing some of the very serious problems, even if we start now,” he says. “Unfortunately the most remote wilderness spots are becoming testament to the scale of the problem, not just for biodiversity but for us.”

What’s scarier is that Henderson Island’s 17.6 tons is nothing compared to the the total weight of garbage on the planet. In fact, we create exactly that much plastic every two seconds. (Here’s a list of a few ways you can cut down on the amount the trash you generate, just in case you’re now panicking like I am.) Five trillion bits of plastic are estimated to be swilling around our oceans, but we don’t know where most of it ends up once it gets there. Today’s study indicates that remote islands like Henderson may be holding onto some of those “lost” plastics, becoming our unintentional landfills.

“Remote studies like this help us to understand rates of accumulation, composition, and fate of plastic pollution,” says Barnes, who was not involved in the study. Although the amount of trash that gets deposited varies from coastline to coastline, Lavers and Bond hope that doing more beach surveys will help to plug in some of the missing pieces of the plastics puzzle. Plus, these studies are cheaper than trawling through the garbage patches in the ocean.

“The human footprint is everywhere,” says Lavers, “and it runs deeper than most of us imagine.”

Diversity Macht Frei, Magdalena Żuk, a 27-year-old Polish tourist who fell to her death from a hospital window in an Egyptian resort may have been drugged and gang-raped. Video footage has emerged which showed her lashing out at several men and acting erratically only a few hours before her death.

Polish media report that Magdalena bought two tickets to Egypt for a holiday over the May Day weekend but her boyfriend was unable to travel as his passport had expired.

They agreed she should just enjoy the break on her own. But a few days after arriving she felt unwell and began acting strangely. She then called her boyfriend and in a video chat she begged him to “take me away.” He asked her what had happened to her and she indicated that she could not remember, but was clearly terrified. Magdalena reportedly obtained an earlier flight home to Poland but was prevented from boarding because of her confused mental state.

She then visited two hospitals but was turned away, with doctors telling her: “We do not deal with mental illnesses.”

Krzysztof Rutkowski, a private investigator who has worked on several high-profile cases in Poland, has been hired by her family to find out what happened to her.
He said his initial theory was that her confused state was due to date rape drugs and that her drink may have been spiked at some point.

A comment from the source article:

“You don’t have to be Sherlock Holms for this one. Gang member 1: Receptionist - on the lookout for unaccompanied European women. Gang member 2: Barman who is tipped off and has drug under the counter.Gang member 3 & 4 Hotel security or pretending to be so. Girl comes down for drink. becomes very dizzy and sick. the two helpful security persons offer help to her room - she accepts. You can fill in the rest. In this case she ‘came to’ and can identify the attackers- if she gets to police and relates the facts.. they know what will happen to them and it aint pleasant. She must commit suicide quick before she has time to make a statement. Probably been doing it for years.”

Do not go to muslim countries for holidays, especially when alone.