Politico: What populists get wrong about migration

As part of the medical team that rescues and cares for the migrants that arrived in Sicily, I heard countless stories of abuse, violence and rape. Many were detained in Libya, where people are routinely forced into slavery and tortured for ransom. None boarded our vessel with the bags that Salvini would have them repack. [...]

As my patients’ stories attest, the EU’s tunnel vision when it comes to cutting the number of people migrating to Europe creates increasingly dangerous and deadly journeys for those compelled to flee their countries. Its decision to cooperate with Libya, in particular, has led to flagrant human rights abuses. [...]

The EU has tied development assistance to harsh migration policies in the transit countries of the Sahel. Niger — the main transit country for the majority who travel north to Europe — for example, has become the largest per capita recipient of EU foreign aid. Algeria, in recent months, has dropped thousands of people in the desert without food or water.  

read the article

EUobserver: EU failed to clean up diesel cars, report says

The paper said that 91 percent of all cars approved with a Euro 6 label not only exceeded the nitrogen oxides (NOx) emission level associated with that label, but were even higher than the less strict Euro 5 label which preceded it.  [...]

Remote sensing allows for mass-checking. According to the report's authors, they collected some 750,000 records in France, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, although that figure also includes vans and trucks, not only cars.  [...]

"For the particular aspect of NOx emissions of diesel vehicles the European emission legislation therefore must be considered as an almost complete failure until now," Tomasz Husak, the head of cabinet of industry commissioner Elzbieta Bienkowska, said in a confidential paper EUobserver reported on last year.

read the article

statista: The worst countries to be gay in Europe

The latest edition of ILGA Europe's Rainbow List has found that Malta, Belgium and Norway are the most LGBTI-friendly countries in Europe. The annual review ranks 49 European countries on a scale from 0 percent to 100 percent. Those closer to 0 percent are considered worst for gross violations of human rights and discrimination while the other end of the scale respects human rights and full equality.

LGBTI people planning a trip are best advised to avoid Turkey, Armenia and Azerbeijan. The latter is rock-bottom of the ranking with 4.70 percent. Russia, host of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, also scores poorly on the list with 10.90 percent.

see the map

Haaretz: How Russia Angered Iran in Syria and Had to Pull Its Troops From the Lebanese Border

The situation was resolved on Tuesday when Syrian army soldiers took over three positions where the Russians had deployed near the town of Qusair in the Homs region on Monday, one of the officials, a military commander, told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

It appeared to be a rare case of Russia acting out of sync with President Bashar al-Assad's Iran-backed allies in the war. Iranian and Russian support has been critical to Assad's war effort. [...]

Russia and Iran-backed forces such as Hezbollah have worked together against the insurgency. Hezbollah deployed to Syria in 2012. The Russian air force arrived in 2015 in support of Assad.

But their different agendas in Syria have become more apparent of late as Israel presses Russia to make sure Iran and its allies do not entrench their military sway in the country.

read the article

Vox: Study: Christianity in Western Europe is as much about identity as belief

In a telephone survey of more than 24,000 people in Western Europe, Pew discovered that, particularly when it came to Christianity, beliefs about God and identification as a Christian didn’t always overlap. In Western Europe in particular, the poll suggested, Christianity serves as a kind of cultural and nationalist identity marker as much as, if not more than, it does a religious faith. [...]

Just 64 percent of church-attending identified Christians believe in God as described in the Bible, while a mere 24 percent of non-practicing Christians do. (By contrast, 80 percent of American Christians say they believe in the biblical God.)

Among church-attending European Christians, high percentages express views that suggest a degree of nationalism: 72 percent say that it is important to be ethnically linked to a given country in order to be considered “fully” a member of that country (thus, for example, Germans “should” have German ancestry), and 49 percent believe that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with their culture. These numbers drop among non-practicing Christians — just 52 percent say someone’s full membership in a country should be predicated on their ethnicity, and 45 percent say Islam is incompatible with their culture.

The answers to those two questions drop even further among the religiously unaffiliated — down to 42 and 32 percent, respectively. More broadly, churchgoing Christians in Europe tended to have more negative views about Muslims, Jews, and immigrants than their non-churchgoing Christian counterparts, who in turn had more negative views than the religiously unaffiliated.

read the article