Independent: Human rights activist projected 'Daesh Bank' onto Saudi Arabia's embassy in Berlin

The "guerrilla light project" was organised by artist Oliver Bienkowski, who wanted to highlight the country's relationship with the extreme Islamist movement and its much-criticised human rights record. [...]

Another message projected onto the Berlin embassy's wall highlighted the treatment of Raif Badawi, a Saudi blogger, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for criticising the government.

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The Guardian: Boris Johnson criticised for 'desperate' link between EU and Hitler

The former mayor of London drew criticism on Saturday after making the link between the EU and the Nazi dictator in a newspaper interview. While he acknowledged the EU was using “different methods” to the Nazis, his incendiary comparison quickly enraged Remain campaigners. [...]

“One week it is dog-whistle attacks on President [Barack] Obama. Now he is trying to liken the institution that has kept peace on our continent for decades with Hitler, who pursued the genocide of millions of innocent people.

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Polish government withdraws financial support for a women's aid centre because it "helps only some people"

Polish Ministry of Finance refused to continue financial support for a women's aid centre which helps  victims of human trafficking and domestic violence. According to the ministry it is not acceptable that the centre helps only female victims. The Polish Ombudsman's office has announced it will intervene on the behalf of the women's aid centre.

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The Atlantic: Why Trump Looks Eerily Familiar to Germans

In Poland, Hungary, and Denmark, conservative populist parties have already obtained power. On Monday, Werner Faymann, Austria’s long-time center-left chancellor, abruptly resigned amid rising anxiety within his Social Democratic Party about the growing strength of the country’s nativist Freedom Party. In France, Marine Le Pen of the National Front consistently ranks near the top in polls for next spring’s presidential election. England’s U.K. Independence Party largely fizzled in last year’s parliamentary election, but this nationalist wave is behind the campaign to get Britain to withdraw from the European Union, which will be considered in next month’s national referendum.

These parties all draw on distinct local concerns, but observers in Europe see far more similarity than difference among them. Like Trump, these politicians’ messages are built on two pillars: hostility to foreign influences and suspicion of domestic elites. All draw on the fear that economic and cultural globalization, along with demographic change, is erasing their nation’s unique identity—creating the imperative to make [fill in the country] great again.

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The Guardian: US Catholic church has spent millions fighting clergy sex abuse accountability

Since 2007, the New York bishops’ lobbying arms have poured more than $1.1m into “issues associated with timelines for commencing certain civil actions related to sex offenses”, nearly half of their total compensation for lobbyists in that period. Another nearly $700,000 also went towards lobbying for a package of church priorities, including but not limited to influencing the climate on “statute of limitations” legislation.

During this same time period, bishops’ conferences spent millions on lobbyists in states where the church is actively opposing similar legislative proposals. Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey spent more than $5.2m, $1.5m and $435,000 respectively on top lobbyists in the state capitols. Opposition efforts ultimately thwarted statute of limitations reform efforts in those states. [...]

A Pennsylvania grand jury report revealed that as many as 50 church officials in the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown had for five decades helped cover up the abuse of hundreds of children in collusion with police and county officials. In April, following some of the grand jury’s recommendations, the Pennsylvania state house overwhelmingly passed an extensive reform bill, abolishing the criminal statute of limitations for child sex abuse cases and permitting child sexual abuse victims as old as 50 to file civil claims

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The Washington Post: The real refugee crisis is in the Middle East, not Europe

The Syrian conflict has reached its fifth year, but the European aspect of the refugee crisis it generated has dominated news headlines since the summer of 2015. Numerous  academic panels have been convened to discuss how the European Union is (not) coping with its increasing numbers of asylum seekers. A supra-national entity of 500 million, the E.U. is up in arms at the 1 million Syrian refugees who entered its borders last year. To put this in perspective, that’s about the same number of Syrian refugees currently in Lebanon, a country of just 4.5 million. While the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region currently hosts around 4.8 million Syrian refugees alone (not to mention Iraqi, Palestinian and many others), they are treated more as passive refugee-hosting vessels than as actors with their own interests. [...]

For almost 70 years, Jordan has accepted generations of refugees from the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Syria. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) indicates that 638,000 Syrian refugees live in Jordan; official Jordanian statistics put the number at 1.3 million [...]

Jordanian officials have not used the same xenophobic rhetoric that surfaced in Eastern Europe, the United States and Australia to discourage refugee settlement. But Jordanians have vocally criticized a perceived decline in their standard of living and feel the ache of “host community fatigue” as the refugee burden includes rising costs and crowded schools, streets and hospitals.

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