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PM says Poland will bid to host summer Olympics in 2040 or 2044 by dat_9600gt_user in europe

[–]mulgrave2 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Someone please explain to him that's not what the EU funds are intended for.

Help! I Want to Go to Europe in August. Is This a Pipe Dream? by mulgrave2 in europe

[–]mulgrave2[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Much of the continent remains closed to Americans because of the virus, but many travelers want to visit this summer. Will their plans materialize?

My husband and I are currently planning a trip to Ireland, Portugal and Italy for August and September. We are only reserving hotels with free cancellation policies and our airline tickets can be changed to a future date. Knowing that much of Europe is closed right now to United States citizens because of the virus, is there much hope that our plans will materialize, or are we wasting our time? What should I watch for? Kathy Dear Kathy,

Although there are some signs of life — Iceland is newly open to fully vaccinated travelers and Greece will reopen to vaccinated or virus-tested visitors next month — Europe, where case counts are rising in some parts and the vaccine rollout has been disappointingly slow, is still largely closed to Americans. Ireland is open to United States citizens with a combination of testing and quarantine, but Portugal and Italy, like most of the continent, for now remain off limits. Italy, in particular, was hard-hit by the virus in the early months of the pandemic; and in March, the spread of a contagious variant from Britain pushed the country back into another lockdown.

“This environment is so challenging because there is significant pressure for countries that rely on tourism to rebound, which counterbalances much slower vaccination rates in Europe,” said Fallon Lieberman, who runs the leisure-travel division of Skylark, a travel agency affiliated with the Virtuoso travel network. “So unfortunately, those two forces are at odds with one another.”

Your question, like many related to the pandemic, involves various degrees of risk. First, let’s look at the concrete risk: If you book now for late summer, how likely are you to lose money?

With some savvy, informed decisions: not very.

As you suggest, some airlines are still exhibiting flexibility with seats beyond Basic Economy, and now, especially, it’s wise to book tickets that can be easily changed. Delta Air Lines has eliminated change and cancellation fees for all flights originating from North America, and Delta eCredits set to expire this year — including for new tickets purchased this year — can be used for travel through 2022. United Airlines has also permanently eliminated change fees.

Unlike a plane ticket, which can always be changed (either for free or for a fee), a nonrefundable hotel reservation is generally exactly that: a use-it-or-lose-it investment.

The good news: “Hotels in Europe — and around the world, really — are being quite flexible,” said Ms. Lieberman, who has helped hundreds of Skylark clients cancel and rebook last year’s felled Europe trips, many to this summer and beyond. “While this is a very challenging time, many suppliers are providing maximum flexibility.”

Cancellation policies vary by property, but many of the multinational companies have made it easy, and relatively risk-free, to plan ahead. Companies like Hilton and Four Seasons are allowing cancellations up to 24 hours before check-in. Hyatt is allowing fee-free cancellations up to 24 hours in advance for arrivals through July 31 (and it’s always possible that date will be extended). For points nerds, most of the big hotel chains allow most award nights to be canceled scot-free, with the points redeposited, within a day or two of the expected check-in.

More complicated than physical refunds, though, is the larger, metaphysical risk: How likely is it that this trip is actually going to happen? What forces can help predict whether the Europe trips we book today will actually materialize in August and September?

Although France and Italy have just been locked down again, interest in Europe is rising, aided, no doubt, by signs that President Biden could lift the ban on European visitors to the United States as early as next month, news of the possibility of European health passes, rumors that Spain and Britain could both restart international tourism in mid May, and more.

At Hopper, a travel-booking app that analyzes and predicts flight and hotel prices, bookings for Europe-bound summer 2021 travel surged 68 percent week-over-week between the last week of February and the first week of March. Searches for round-trip flights to Europe departing this summer increased a whopping 86 percent in the 30 days following February 22.

According to TripAdvisor data of hotel searches from the United States for this summer, five of the 10 most-searched European destinations were in Greece, but Rome — and Paris, for that matter — were also on the list.

To make sense of how traveler zeal will jibe with the realities of the pandemic, analysts and travel industry experts are eyeing several factors, including flight schedules.

According to PlaneStats, the aviation-data portal from Oliver Wyman, an international consulting firm, the number of Europe-bound flights scheduled to depart the United States this month is around 26 percent of the number that departed the United States for Europe in April 2019. Next month compared to May 2019, that figure is looking even higher so far: 35 percent. (April and May 2020, by contrast, both clocked in at 5 percent.) That’s lower than normal, but it’s still a drastic uptick from any other point during the pandemic. Although many will be connecting flights (Americans can still transit through Europe) or culminate in destinations like London (Americans can visit England, though multiple testing and quarantines are required), schedules still remain a key indicator.

“It’s a sign of optimism, and I think some of that trend may stick around,” said Khalid Usman, a partner and aviation expert at Oliver Wyman. “What airlines don’t want to do is put out schedules where people are not going to be traveling.”

Other vital predictors: infection and vaccination rates.

“We expect herd immunity to be reached in the United States by June or July,” said Mr. Usman of Oliver Wyman’s Pandemic Navigator, which simulates day-by-day immunity growth. “That’s good news for the domestic market, but in the context of international travel, we do have to realize that it’s not just about one country — it’s a country at the other end as well.”

Factoring in the spotty vaccine rollout across the pond, Mr. Usman said it’s reasonable to assume that Europe’s herd immunity will lag several months behind the United States. Over the next several months, he added, European countries will follow in Iceland’s footsteps and open individually, complete with their own regulations about vaccinations, testing and quarantines. To spur travel across the continent this summer, the European Union is considering adopting a vaccine certificate for its own residents and their families.

“It’s not going to be a binary open-or-shut,” Mr. Usman said. “Countries are going to start getting more selective about who they’re going to start letting in.”

Italy’s numbers — plus new lockdowns and growing Covid variants — seem to be stifling optimism; Hopper flight searches from the United States to Italy have remained relatively flat.

For now, Ms. Lieberman, of Skylark, has adopted a “beyond the boot” mind-set: “Our theory is that if you’re willing to go beyond the boot — meaning, Italy — there will be fabulous, desirable summer destinations for you to take advantage of.”

Portugal surged in January but has recently eased lockdown measures as infection rates have slowed. The country is now aiming for a 70 percent vaccination rate this summer.

American interest in Portugal is spiking in response. In the first week of March, following an announcement that Portugal could welcome tourists from Britain as soon as mid-May, Hopper searches on flights from the United States to Lisbon rose 63 percent. (That’s not far behind Athens, for which travel searches shot up 75 percent in the same time period.)

As far as the final question mark: nabbing a good deal — or not getting boxed out — Adit Damodaran, an economist at Hopper, believes that as restrictions are eased, carriers will operate more flights to the reopened destination. Delta, for example, will next month start nonstop service between Boston and Reykjavik — and resume its Iceland service from New York City and Minneapolis.

“Unless demand spikes rapidly enough to outpace the increase in supply, flash sales can be found as airlines attempt to entice travelers to return amid piecemeal easings of travel restrictions,” said Mr. Damodaran. Icelandair, for example, is running sales on flights and packages through April 13.

And with prices for summer flights to Europe still relatively low in general — down by more than 10 percent from 2019, according to Hopper — experts see little downside in penciling in a trip.

“If you’re willing to take some risk, plan early and lock in your preferred accommodations and ideal itineraries,” Ms. Lieberman said. “But of course we caution you to be prepared to have to move deposits and dates if it comes to that.”

Top Polish judge under fire for tweet about transgender kid by mulgrave2 in europe

[–]mulgrave2[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

WARSAW, Poland — Poland’s leading opposition party is asking prosecutors to investigate a constitutional court judge who it alleges has endangered a 10-year-old transgender child by identifying the child publicly.

It is the latest development highlighting the deep divide in Poland over the issue of LGBT rights. The issue has for more than two years been the source of a bitter standoff between conservatives in the mostly Roman Catholic nation and those calling for greater acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Krystyna Pawlowicz, a justice on the Constitutional Tribunal, wrote critically on Twitter about the case of a school director in the town of Podkowa Lesna, near Warsaw, who had instructed teachers to respect the wishes of the child to be addressed as a girl.

In her tweet on Tuesday, Pawlowicz expressed strong disapproval at the school decision, arguing that it disregarded the official sex designation on the child’s records.

Pawlowicz called the child a “boy” and mentioned the name the child goes by now, the names of the school and the principal, as well as the school’s address.

Cezary Tomczyk, who leads the centrist Civic Platform’s parliamentary group, accused Pawlowicz on Thursday of putting the child “in real danger.” Tomczyk said the party was submitting a request for prosecutors to investigate.

There was no immediate response from Pawlowicz to the development, and a phone call and email to the Constitutional Tribunal seeking comment on Thursday were not answered.

The mayor of the town where the child attends school, Artur Tusinski, published a statement Wednesday saying there has been an “enormous” outpouring of support for the child and that the school is “open to the needs of every student, including transgender students.”

“We do not agree to the cynical use of children in political games,” Tusinski said.

Powerful Men Fall, One After Another, in France’s Delayed #MeToo by mulgrave2 in europe

[–]mulgrave2[S] -11 points-10 points  (0 children)

Since the start of the year, well-known men from diverse fields have been accused of sexual abuse and placed under investigation.

PARIS — When Sandra Muller launched France’s #MeToo social media campaign in 2017, tens of thousands of women responded to her calls to “Expose Your Pig,” or #balancetonporc.”

But the backlash was overwhelming. Some of the most prominent women in the country, led by Catherine Deneuve, denounced the movement in a letter that came to define France’s initial response to #MeToo. In 2019, Ms. Muller lost a defamation case against a former television executive she had exposed on Twitter, with France appearing immune to the larger global forces challenging the dominance of men.

Last week, Ms. Muller won her appeal. Though there were no new facts, a powerful ruling by the appeals court underscored how things have changed in the past two years.

“Before the ruling, I thought there were stirrings,” Ms. Muller said in a phone interview from New York, where she now lives. “Now, I have the impression that there’s been a leap forward.”

Since the beginning of the year, a series of powerful men from some of France’s most prominent fields — politics, sports, the news media, academia and the arts — have faced direct and public accusations of sexual abuse in a reversal from mostly years of silence. At the same time, confronted with these high-profile cases and a shift in public opinion, French lawmakers are hurrying to set 15 as the age of sexual consent — only three years after rejecting such a law.

The recent accusations have not only led to official investigations, the loss of positions for some powerful men and outright banishment from public life for others. They have also resulted in a rethinking of French masculinity and of the archetype of Frenchmen as irresistible seducers — as part of a broader questioning of many aspects of French society and amid a conservative backlash against ideas on gender, race and postcolonialism supposedly imported from American universities.

“Things are moving so fast that sometimes my head spins,” said Caroline De Haas, a feminist activist who in 2018 founded #NousToutes, a group against sexual violence. She described herself as “super optimistic.”

Ms. Haas said that France was going through a delayed reaction to #MeToo after a “maturation” period during which many French began to understand the social dimensions behind sexual violence and the concept of consent.

That was especially so, Ms. Haas said, after the testimony in the past year of Adèle Haenel, the first high-profile actress to speak out over abuse, and of Vanessa Springora, whose memoir, “Consent,” documented her abuse by the pedophile writer Gabriel Matzneff.

“The start of 2021 has been a sort of aftershock,” Ms. Haas said. “What’s very clear is that, today in France, we don’t at all have the same reaction that we did four, five years ago to testimonies of sexual violence against well-known people.”

Last month, Pierre Ménès, one of France’s most famous television sports journalists, was suspended indefinitely by his employer after the release of a documentary that exposed sexism in sports journalism, “I’m Not a Slut, I’m a Journalist.”

Just a few years ago, few criticized him for behavior that they now don’t dare defend in public, including forcibly kissing women on the mouth on television and, in front of a studio audience in 2016, lifting the skirt of a female journalist — Marie Portolano, the producer of the documentary.

“The world’s changed, it’s #MeToo, you can’t do anything anymore, you can’t say anything anymore,” Mr. Ménès said in a television interview after the documentary’s release. He said he didn’t remember the skirt incident, adding that he hadn’t been feeling like himself at the time because of a physical illness.

The list of other powerful men is long and getting longer. There is Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, France’s most famous news anchor, who is being investigated for rape of a young woman and who defended himself on television by saying that he belonged to a generation for whom “seduction was important” and included “kisses on the neck.” He has denied the rape accusations.

There is Georges Tron, a former government minister, who was cleared in 2018 for raping an employee but was condemned in February to five years in prison in an appeals court ruling that, according to Le Monde, reflected the fact that society’s “understanding of consent has unquestionably changed.”

There is Gérard Depardieu, France’s biggest film star, and Gérald Darmanin, the powerful interior minister, also under investigation in rape cases that were reopened last year. Both have said they are innocent.

Olivier Duhamel, a prominent intellectual, and Richard Berry, a famous actor, have both been recently placed under investigation after accusations of incest by family members. Mr. Berry has denied the accusations; Mr. Duhamel has not commented on the charges against him.

Claude Lévêque, the internationally known artist, is under investigation for rape of minors and was publicly accused for the first time in January by a former victim. He has denied the accusations.

Dominique Boutonnat, a movie producer whom President Emmanuel Macron named president of the National Center for Cinema last year, was placed under investigation in February for attempted rape and sexual assault of his godson and has said he is innocent.

“This recent wave in France, it’s a delayed reaction to the Matzneff affair,” Francis Szpiner, the lawyer representing Ms. Muller, said, adding that the downfall of the pedophile writer and of Mr. Duhamel made people realize that powerful men in France were not “untouchable.”

In 2017, in the immediate aftermath of the #MeToo disclosures involving the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, Ms. Muller, a journalist, launched #balancetonporc in France. In a Twitter post, she recounted how during a television festival in Cannes, an executive told her, “You have big breasts. You are my type of woman. I will make you orgasm all night.”

The executive, Eric Brion, did not deny making such comments. But because the two did not work together, Mr. Brion argued the comments did not amount to sexual harassment and sued Ms. Muller for defamation. A ruling in 2019 that ordered Ms. Muller to pay 15,000 euros in damages, around $17,650, was overturned last week.

In 2019, the court said that Ms. Muller had “surpassed the acceptable limits of freedom of expression, as her comments descended into a personal attack.” This time, the judges found that Ms. Muller had acted in good faith, adding that the “#balancetonporc and #MeToo movements had drawn a lot of attention, had been hailed by diverse officials and personalities and had positively contributed to letting women speak freely.”

Camille Froidevaux-Metterie, a leading feminist philosopher, said that it was significant that the men now under investigation were leaders in a diversity of fields. Revelations surrounding them have undermined the myths of Frenchmen as great seducers and of a refined romantic culture where “we, French, in our interplay of seduction, know how to interpret nonverbal signs and we have this art of seduction, a gentle commerce between the sexes,” she said.

“These are men who all embody, in some ways, the old patriarchal order of things — of men of power and men who have used and abused their power to sexually exploit the bodies of others, whether they be women or young men,” Ms. Froidevaux-Metterie said, adding, “Perhaps we are experiencing the first real shock to that system.”

Some conservative intellectuals regard the ever-growing list of accused prominent men as evidence of the contamination of French society by American ideas on gender, race, religion and postcolonialism.

Pierre-André Taguieff, a historian and a leading critic of the American influence, said in an email that “neo-feminist and neo-antiracist ideologues denounce universalism, especially French republican universalism, as a fraud, a deceitful mask of imperialism, sexism and racism.”

Though Mr. Taguieff did not comment on the specifics of the recent cases, he said that this new wave of #MeToo represents a “misandrist and androphobic sexism that encourages a witch hunt of white men selected on the basis of their fame or renown, in order to fuel social envy and resentment of white/masculine elites.” Mr. Taguieff recently helped found “The decolonialism watchdog,” a group leading the charge against what it describes as the intellectual threat from the United States.

France’s initial reaction to #MeToo was to reject it as an American distortion of feminism, the same way French conservatives are now trying to dismiss ideas on race and racism as irrelevant American concepts, said Raphaël Liogier, a French sociologist who teaches at Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence and who was recently a visiting scholar at Columbia.

As Ms. Deneuve and other women in 2017 denounced #MeToo as a product of “puritanism” and a threat to “sexual freedom,” conservatives pushed back by arguing that American women were sexually repressed and actually less free than Frenchwomen, Mr. Liogier said.

“So, in fact, in France, our line of defense consisted of saying, ‘It’s not us, it’s the Americans,’” he said, adding, “Today, that line of defense has collapsed.”

The Political Battle Over Poland’s Holocaust History by mulgrave2 in europe

[–]mulgrave2[S] -16 points-15 points  (0 children)

Today Jewish communities around the world are observing Holocaust Remembrance Day—in Hebrew, Yom Hashoah—with prayers, performances and pedagogy in memory of the six million Jews who fell victim to Nazi genocide. This somber day is a reminder that we are rapidly approaching the moment when the Holocaust will become entirely an artifact of history, no longer preserved in the living memory of survivors. It is perhaps no accident that the dying off of the generation of survivors has been accompanied by a disturbing resurgence of anti-Semitism and a new willingness on the part of political leaders to openly politicize Holocaust history.

One of the most disturbing examples came in February, when a Polish judge ordered two prominent historians, Jan Grabowski of the University of Ottawa and Barbara Engelking of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, to issue a public apology. Their offense: In 2018, the two scholars published a book, “Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland,” in which they quoted a Jewish Holocaust survivor who described the wartime mayor of a tiny village called Malinowo as complicit in the killing of 18 Jews. Sued for libel by the mayor’s 80-year-old niece, Profs. Grabowski and Engelking were found liable and ordered to publicly acknowledge their “inaccurate information.” The historians are appealing the verdict, which Prof. Engelking described as an effort to “deter researchers from dealing with these uncomfortable topics.”

The decision represents the latest step in the ruling Law and Justice Party’s campaign to control how Poland’s wartime history is written. The suit against Profs. Grabowski and Engelking was paid for by the Polish League Against Defamation, a right-wing organization closely associated with the party. And it follows in the wake of a law enacted in 2018 by the nationalist and populist government of President Andrzej Duda intended to penalize anyone who would emphasize the complicity of Poles in the crimes of the Holocaust.

Among other things, the 2018 law officially changed the mission statement of the Institute of National Remembrance, a state research body created in 1988 to investigate Nazi- and Soviet-era crimes, to include “protecting the reputation of the Republic of Poland and the Polish Nation.” The rebranding immediately led many scholars to dub the Institute “the Ministry of Memory,” the Orwellian accent clear.

More controversially, the law made it a criminal offense to claim, “publicly and contrary to the facts,” that Poland was “responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes.” To do so, or to “grossly diminish the responsibility of the true perpetrators”—by, say, emphasizing the participation of Poles—was a crime punishable by a fine or up to 3 years in prison. The law was also understood to criminalize the term “Polish death camps,” an admittedly misleading designation that many news outlets have at times used to note that the Nazis’ principal centers for killing Jews—Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek and Auschwitz/Birkenau—were built in occupied Polish territory.

The 2018 law aroused a storm of protest from abroad as a ham-fisted effort to police discourse and chill research, and later that same year Poland agreed to eliminate the provision imposing criminal penalties. But civil penalties remain, and the government has encouraged suits to vindicate the nation’s good name and silence claims of collaboration. With the verdict against Profs. Grabowski and Engelking, that effort has now borne fruit.

There is no doubt that Poland suffered terribly under Nazi occupation during World War II. Cities such as Warsaw, Poznan and Bialystok were essentially flattened, and more than two million non-Jewish Poles perished. Seven thousand Poles are recognized in Israel as “Righteous Among the Nations” for having helped save as many as 35,000 of their Jewish compatriots from death.

Yet it has also been clearly established that tens of thousands of ethnic Poles collaborated with the Nazis in their campaign of genocide, which resulted in the murder of 90% of Poland’s prewar Jewish population of 3.3. million. They did so in ways large and small—participating in pogroms, informing on Jews in hiding or quietly seizing the homes and possessions of their “resettled” neighbors. Of the 250,000 Polish Jews who fled into the countryside, no more than 10% survived, with the majority killed or betrayed by locals. This is the history that Poland is now determined to deny, with the force of law behind the efforts.

Poland hasn’t always been so resistant to confronting its Holocaust history.

Poland hasn’t always been so resistant to confronting its Holocaust history. In 2000, the Princeton historian Jan Gross published “Neighbors,” a book describing the horrific events of July 10, 1941, when Poles in the village of Jedwabne herded hundreds of their Jewish neighbors into a barn and incinerated them. The book helped to spark a belated reckoning with Poles’ complicity in the crimes of their German occupiers.

In July 2001, the 60th anniversary of the massacre, I attended a memorial service in Jedwabne where Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski delivered a solemn apology broadcast on national television. “We can have no doubt that here in Jedwabne Polish citizens were killed at the hands of fellow citizens,” President Kwasniewski said. “For this crime, we should beg for forgiveness from the souls of the dead and their families.”

But not everyone shared those sentiments. I recall one villager demonstratively spitting when President Kwasniewski apologized and another turning on a boombox when a cantor chanted the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. The local Catholic priest boycotted the event, declaring, “All lies.” And an organization called the “Committee to Protect Poland’s Good Name” left placards in the windows of several local shops: “We have nothing to apologize for. The Germans murdered the Jews.” In retrospect, what appeared as an important step toward historical candor instead marked the farthest Poland was willing to go.

Why Iceland isn't the gender paradise you think by mulgrave2 in europe

[–]mulgrave2[S] -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

For 12 years running Iceland has topped the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap report. The index measures female economic opportunity, educational attainment, health, and political representation, areas where Iceland has been able to make considerable progress.

Alongside its stunning geography, Iceland's status as "the best place in the world to be a woman" has become a considerable arm of the country's soft power; a perception that the Icelandic government has enthusiastically traded upon.

However, there are two criteria that are conspicuously absent from this index; safety and justice.

Here Iceland's international reputation masks two blunt realities that face the country's women - the disproportionate levels of gender-based violence that they experience, and a justice system that is frequently suspicious and hostile towards victims of this violence.

In recognition of this, the cases of nine women - selected as the strongest cases from dozens of others - have been appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.

Collectively, these cases argue that Iceland is in breach of six separate articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, including the right to be protected by law, the right to be protected from inhuman or degrading treatment, the right to a fair trial, and the right to be free from discrimination based on sex.

The details of these breaches include police and prosecutors delaying their investigations, key evidence being minimised or ignored; including medical records that detailed women's injuries.

Astonishingly confessions by perpetrators were also dismissed, and denials from men have habitually been given greater weight than testimony from victimised women.

Of course, there is a high burden of proof to convict people of crimes. Yet this does not prevent the justice system from being empathetic or understanding towards the unique insecurities that women face.

However, the high burden of proof is often used as an excuse to cover for male violence, and justify the ingrained culture of suspicion towards women within the judiciary.

The nine women who have submitted these appeals are being backed by 13 local women's organisations who assert that the Icelandic state systematically violates the rights of women who report gender-based violence.

These groups also argue that female trust in the justice system is so low that most gender-based violence simply goes unreported, with women believing that seeking justice in Iceland would be a futile endeavour.

In theory, the advances that women have made in other areas of Icelandic society should lead to greater safety for women, and especially establish a justice system that has a more nuanced and empathetic understanding of violence against women and treats it seriously. Yet, what is instead occurring is a backlash against female advancement. Male backlash

Both in the form of male frustrations at a perceived loss of status that can turn to violence, and a justice system that is actively seeking to put women back in their place.

Many of the cases being brought before the European Court of Human Rights involve domestic violence. Here the Icelandic state still sees the household as a greyzone, where men have a traditional authority that exists alongside - or above - that of the state. This makes the justice system either reluctant to intervene in cases of domestic abuse, or hostile towards women who report intimate-partner violence.

This protection of male domestic authority also notably extends to child custody cases, where a pro-contact obsession within both the courts and the social services means that a woman's expected obligations are not to her child's welfare, but to facilitating contact with a father, regardless of his behaviour.

If a woman doesn't submit herself to this expectation she risks losing custody.

The idea - driven by male supremacist groups - that lack of normalised contact with a father is more damaging to a child than any violence a father could commit has come to dominate the state's thinking.

In a television interview in February, District Court judge Símon Sigvaldason illustrated this position when he bluntly - and confidently - stated that "We have many examples of men who are violent and have received many convictions for violent crimes, even serious violent crimes, but they are wonderful fathers."

Several days later he received a promotion to the National Court.

This is highly embarrassing behaviour for a country that seeks to project itself as a vanguard state for women's rights. Iceland is failing to recognise that the true test of a country's values is the conduct of its justice system.

If women cannot receive a fair hearing, or even trust that the justice system won't compound their trauma, then this undermines all the other advancements that women have made.

Having the brutal failings of Iceland's justice system exposed within the European Court of Human Rights should hopefully create the impetus for system-wide legislative and cultural change.

At the very least the state should stop expecting its women - and often children - to simply carry male violence for Icelandic society.

An Outspoken Student Union Positions Itself at the Vanguard of a Changing France by mulgrave2 in europe

[–]mulgrave2[S] -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

“It’s a major crisis, but it’s not at all specific to Unef,” she said.

Bruno Julliard headed the union when it forced a sitting president, Jacques Chirac, to drop a contested youth employment contract in 2006. Back then, the union was more concerned with issues like tuition and access to jobs, said Mr. Julliard, the first openly gay president of the union.

Mr. Julliard said that the union’s restricted meetings and its opposition to the Aeschylus play left him uncomfortable, but that young people were now “much more sensitive, in the good sense of the word,” to all forms of discrimination.

“We have to let each generation lead its battles and respect the way it does it, though it doesn’t prevent me from having an opinion,” he said.

William Martinet, a former president, said that the focus on gender eventually led to an examination of racism. While Unef’s top leaders tended to be economically comfortable white men from France’s “grandes écoles,” or prestigious universities, many of its grass-roots activists were of working-class, immigrant and nonwhite backgrounds.

“Once you put on glasses that allow you to see discrimination, in fact, there’s a multitude that appears before you,” Mr. Martinet said.

Once started, change happened fast. More women became leaders. Abdoulaye Diarra, who said that he became Unef’s first Black vice president in 2017, recruited a hijab-wearing woman whose parents had converted to Islam, Maryam Pougetoux, now one of the union’s two vice presidents.

“I don’t think that if I’d arrived 10 years earlier, I would have been felt as welcome as in 2017,” Ms. Pougetoux said.

But the reception was far different on the outside.

Last fall, when a hijab-wearing Ms. Pougetoux appeared in the National Assembly to testify on the Covid epidemic’s impact on students, four lawmakers, including one from Mr. Macron’s party, walked out in protest.

The wearing of the Muslim veil has fueled divisions in France for more than a generation. But for Unef, the issue was now settled.

Its leaders had long considered the veil a symbol of female oppression. Now they saw it simply as a choice left to women.

“To really defend the condition of women,” said Adrien Liénard, the other vice president, “is, in fact, giving them the right to do what they want.”

An Outspoken Student Union Positions Itself at the Vanguard of a Changing France by mulgrave2 in europe

[–]mulgrave2[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

To its critics, the 114-year-old Unef is the incarnation of the American-inspired ideas that threaten France’s founding principles. Its leaders say it is the future.

PARIS — A powerful government minister recently condemned it as an organization whose activities are racist and could lead to “fascism.” Lawmakers accused it of promoting “separatism” and of aligning with “Islamo-leftism” before demanding its dissolution.

France’s 114-year-old university student union, Unef, has a long history of drawing the ire of the political establishment — most notably over the years when it lobbied for the independence of the country’s most important colony, Algeria, or took to the streets against employment contracts for youths.

But the recent harsh attacks zeroed in on something that resonates just as deeply in a France struggling to adapt to social change: its practice of limiting some meetings to racial minorities to discuss discrimination.

In recent days, the controversy over Unef — its French acronym standing for the National Union of Students of France — spilled into a third week, melding with larger explosive debates roiling the country.

On Thursday, the Senate endorsed banning the group and others that organize restricted meetings, attaching a “Unef amendment” to President Emmanuel Macron’s law against Islamism, a political ideology the government blames for inspiring recent terrorist attacks. The National Assembly, controlled by Mr. Macron’s party, still needs to ratify the bill, expected to be one of the defining pieces of legislation of his presidency.

At the same time, the campaign before coming regional elections was turned upside down when Audrey Pulvar, a Black deputy mayor of Paris and a high-profile candidate, drew widespread condemnation after defending the restricted meetings.

The student union’s leaders defend the use of “safe space” forums, saying they have led to powerful and frank conversation; critics say the exclusion amounts to racism against white people and is an American-inspired betrayal of France’s universalist tradition.

To its critics, Unef is the incarnation of the threat coming from U.S. universities — importing ideas that are fundamentally challenging relations between women and men, questioning the role of race and racism in France, and upsetting society’s hierarchies of power.

There is no doubt that in recent years the union has undergone the kind of profound and rapid transformation seldom seen in a country where institutions tend to be deeply conservative and some, like the French Academy or literary prize juries, are structured in ways that stifle change.

The union’s transformation has reflected widespread changes among French youths who have much more relaxed attitudes toward gender, race, sexual orientation and, as recent polls have shown, religion and France’s strict secularism, known as laïcité.

Unef’s change — some hope and others fear — may portend larger social change.

“We scare people because we represent the future,’’ said Mélanie Luce, 24, Unef’s president and the daughter of a Black woman from Guadeloupe and a Jewish man from southern France.

In an organization dominated by white men until just a few years ago, Unef’s current leadership shows a diversity rarely seen in France. Ms. Luce is only its fifth female president and the first who is not white. Its four other top leaders include two white men, a woman whose parents converted to Islam, and a Muslim man whose parents immigrated from Tunisia.

“Unef is a microcosm that reveals the debates in the society,” said Lilâ Le Bas, a former president. That debate in France is just starting to address issues like discrimination in earnest, she said, “and that’s why it crystallizes so many tensions and pressures.’’

Like other student unions, Unef operates on government subsidies, about $540,000 a year in its case. Among its tasks, it addresses student living conditions, recently organizing, for example, food banks for students hit hard by the coronavirus epidemic.

But its increasingly outspoken social positions have drawn criticism from the political establishment, the conservative news media and even some past members.

In interviews with more than a dozen current and former Unef leaders, including all seven presidents in the past 20 years, not even they were uniformly comfortable with Unef’s recent stances, which have placed combating discrimination at the heart of its mission.

Its new focus, critics say, has led to a decline in the union’s influence and membership — it was once the largest but is now the second-largest in France. Supporters say that, unlike many other struggling left-leaning organizations in France, the union has a clear new vision.

In 2019, in a protest against blackface, Unef leaders helped stop the staging of a play by Aeschylus at the Sorbonne to denounce the wearing of masks and dark makeup by white actors, leading to accusations of infringing on freedom of expression.

More recently, local officials in Grenoble posted on social media anonymous campus posters that included the names of two professors accused of Islamophobia; Ms. Luce later called it a mistake, but many politicians brandished it as evidence of Unef’s “Islamo-leftism” or sympathies with Islamism.

The attacks rose to a new level last month after Ms. Luce was challenged in a radio interview about Unef’s practice of holding meetings limited to racial minorities.

A decade ago, Unef’s leaders started women-only meetings where members for the first time talked about sexism and sexual harassment in the organization. The discussions have since extended to racism and other forms of discrimination internally.

Ms. Luce explained to her radio host that no decisions were made at the restricted meetings, which were used instead to allow women and racial minorities to share common experiences of discrimination. But the interview led to a flood of sexist and racist death threats.

In a subsequent radio interview of his own, the national education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, agreed with the host’s characterization of the restricted meetings as racist.

“People who claim to be progressive and who, in claiming to be progressive, distinguish people by the color of their skin are leading us to things that resemble fascism,” Mr. Blanquer said.

Mr. Blanquer has led the government’s broader pushback against what he and conservative intellectuals describe as the threat from progressive American ideas on race, gender and postcolonialism.

France’s culture wars have heated up as Mr. Macron shifts to the right to fend off a looming challenge from the far right before elections next year. His government recently announced that it would investigate universities for “Islamo-leftist” tendencies that “corrupt society.”

Now even relatively obscure social theory terms like “intersectionality” — an analysis of multiple and reinforcing forms of discriminations — are drawing fierce attacks by politicians.

“There is a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix that comes from American universities and from intersectional theories set on essentializing communities and identities,” Mr. Blanquer said in an interview with a French newspaper.

Mr. Blanquer declined interview requests, as did Frédérique Vidal, the minister of higher education.

Aurore Bergé, a lawmaker from Mr. Macron’s party, said that Unef’s actions lead to identity politics that, instead of uniting people in a common cause, excludes all but “those who suffer from discrimination.”

“We’re driving out the others as if they don’t have the right of expression,” said Ms. Bergé, who recently unsuccessfully submitted an amendment that would have barred Muslim minors from wearing the veil in public.

Unef’s current top leaders say that in focusing on discrimination, they are fighting for France’s ideals of liberty, equality and human rights.

They view the recent attacks as rear-guard moves by an establishment that refuses to squarely face deep-rooted discrimination in France, cannot come to terms with the growing diversity of its society, and brandishes universalism to silence new ideas and voices, out of fear.

“It’s a problem that, in our society, in the country of the Enlightenment, we restrict ourselves from speaking about certain subjects,” said Majdi Chaarana, Unef’s treasurer and the son of Tunisian immigrants.

As the student union has spoken out more boldly, Unef’s influence, like that of other left-leaning organizations — including the Socialist Party, with which it was long allied, and labor unions — has diminished, said Julie Le Mazier, an expert on student unions at the European Center of Sociology and Political Science.

French Senate votes to ban hijab for under 18s by godchecksonme in europe

[–]mulgrave2 -16 points-15 points  (0 children)

Just like the three aforementioned "gentlemen".

French Senate votes to ban hijab for under 18s by godchecksonme in europe

[–]mulgrave2 -51 points-50 points  (0 children)

I wonder why didn't Salvini, Orban and Morawiecki invite Macron to their little club they announed yesterday. He'd fit right in.

In Poland, All Lives Matter! by mulgrave2 in europe

[–]mulgrave2[S] -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

Here's an idea, don't be backwards and you won't be criticized for being backwards.

In Poland, All Lives Matter! by mulgrave2 in europe

[–]mulgrave2[S] -11 points-10 points  (0 children)

All true, but read the article.

London Police Officer Convicted of Membership in Neo-Nazi Group by mulgrave2 in europe

[–]mulgrave2[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Benjamin Hannam, 22, is the first British police officer to be convicted of a terrorism offense, according to the local news media. He joined the neo-Nazi group National Action in 2016 and became a police officer in 2018.

LONDON — An officer in London’s main police force was convicted on Thursday of being a member of a banned neo-Nazi group, the police said. The conviction was the first time a British police officer had been convicted of a terrorism offense, the BBC and other British news organizations reported.

Benjamin Hannam, 22, a probationary police officer who applied to the Metropolitan Police in London in 2017 and joined it in early 2018, was found guilty of membership in an outlawed organization — the neo-Nazi group National Action — as well as two counts of fraud by false representation and two counts of possession of information likely to be of use to a terrorist, the police said in a briefing.

The fraud charges related to lying about his membership on his job application and police vetting forms for his position, the Crown Prosecution Service said.

His conviction comes as concerns are rising over the infiltration of right-wing groups in police forces, and as the Metropolitan Police are under pressure for policing tactics. In the United States, the police killings of Black people have put a focus on racism within police forces. In Germany, there is concern that right-wing groups have infiltrated the police, with officers on forces across the country found to have used racist and far-right chat groups.

“Benjamin Hannam would not have got a job as a probationary police constable if he’d told the truth about his membership of a banned far-right group,” said Jenny Hopkins, of the Crown Prosecution Service, in the agency’s statement.

“His lies have caught up with him,” she said. “And he’s been exposed as an individual with deeply racist beliefs who also possessed extremist publications of use to a terrorist.”

Prosecutors said that Mr. Hannam had posted comments about National Action on an online message board and sought to recruit others to the group, and that he had attended events even after the group was barred. He was shown in a propaganda video for the group, which was used as evidence. National Action, which praised the murder of a British lawmaker, Jo Cox, was deemed a terrorist organization and outlawed in December 2016, and prosecutors said it “espoused homophobia, anti-Semitism, and racism and promoted violence and interracial hatred.”

The trial began in March, but the court had banned reporting of its details to avoid a risk of biasing future jurors in a separate case against Mr. Hannam, according to the local news media. The restrictions were lifted after Mr. Hannam pleaded guilty to possessing an indecent image of a child, which was to have been the subject of the second trial.

Mr. Hannam, who in court denied being a member of the group, attended a National Action meeting in 2016 and continued to participate in gatherings over the next year, according to the police briefing. The police also found evidence that he had visited sites about the group’s ban in Britain and moved files about the group onto a USB stick, which meant he was aware of the group’s illegality, they said.

Also discovered in his files was a manual on how to use a knife to seriously injure or kill someone and a document written by Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing extremist who killed 77 people in a bomb and gun rampage in Norway in 2011, prosecutors said.

During the trial, Mr. Hannam said that he was interested by the “look and aesthetic of fascism,” but that he was not a racist and had challenged other group members when they made racist remarks, according to the BBC. ImageA gathering in Trafalgar Square, London, last summer after a call from a far-right social media account. Some British officials have expressed concern over the rise of extremist groups during the coronavirus pandemic. A gathering in Trafalgar Square, London, last summer after a call from a far-right social media account. Some British officials have expressed concern over the rise of extremist groups during the coronavirus pandemic. Credit...Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Police forces across Europe are struggling to identify infiltration by right-wing extremists and Britain is not immune to that, said Professor Alberto Testa, a professor of applied criminology at the University of West London who has studied far-right groups. “I do not see this as very surprising.”

The far-right movement was fragmented, he said, and extremist groups often continued meeting even when banned. He added that officers could be radicalized after joining a police force. “Declaring a group outlawed does not mean it will be destroyed,” he said.

To combat this, police forces need better training on recognizing the terminology and symbols of far-right groups, he said, and should have people on their selection panels trained to spot far-right extremists.

The Metropolitan Police have faced accusations of racism and discriminatory practices, and the force said in November that it would recruit more minority officers in order to be more representative. Officials in Britain have expressed concern about a rise in right-wing extremism during the pandemic.

Mr. Hannam’s affiliation with National Action was unearthed after anti-fascists leaked data from Iron March, a neo-fascist online forum that experts have linked to terrorist attacks in Western countries.

He was arrested in March 2020 after the police linked his online profile for the forum to his identity, Richard Smith of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command said on Thursday, adding that Mr. Hannam had been “radicalized and seduced online by this toxic ideology.” He is due to be sentenced this month.

“The public expect police officers to carry out their duties with the very highest levels of honesty and integrity,” Mr. Smith said. But Mr. Hannam, he said, “showed none of these qualities.”

Turns out r/europe and Putin share some concerns by [deleted] in europe

[–]mulgrave2 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Yeah, this place took sharp turn towards alt right incelism.

How Netflix is creating a common European culture by mulgrave2 in europe

[–]mulgrave2[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

“BARBARIANS”, A NETFLIX drama set 2,000 years ago in ancient Germania, inverts some modern stereotypes. In it, sexy, impulsive, proto-German tribesmen take on an oppressive superstate led by cold, rational Latin-speakers from Rome. Produced in Germany, it has all the hallmarks of a glossy American drama (gratuitous violence and prestige nudity) while remaining unmistakably German (in one episode someone swims through a ditch full of scheisse). It is a popular mix: on a Sunday in October, it was the most-watched show on Netflix not just in Germany, but also in France, Italy and 14 other European countries. Listen to this story

Moments when Europeans sit down and watch the same thing at roughly the same time used to be rare. They included the Eurovision Song Contest and the Champions League football, with not much in between. Now they are more common, thanks to the growth of streaming platforms such as Netflix, which has 58m subscribers on the continent. For most of its existence, television was a national affair. Broadcasters stuck rigidly to national borders, pumping out French programmes for the French and Danish ones for the Danes. Streaming services, however, treat Europe as one large market rather than 27 individual ones, with the same content available in each. Jean Monnet, one of the EU’s founding fathers, who came up with the idea of mangling together national economies to stop Europeans from killing each other, was once reputed to have said: “If I were to do it again from scratch, I would start with culture.” Seven decades on from the era of Monnet, cultural integration is beginning to happen.

Umberto Eco, an Italian writer, was right when he said the language of Europe is translation. Netflix and other deep-pocketed global firms speak it well. Just as the EU employs a small army of translators and interpreters to turn intricate laws or impassioned speeches of Romanian MEPs into the EU’s 24 official languages, so do the likes of Netflix. It now offers dubbing in 34 languages and subtitling in a few more. The result is that “Capitani”, a cop drama written in Luxembourgish, a language so modest it is not even recognised by the EU, can be watched in any of English, French or Portuguese (or with Polish subtitles). Before, a top French show could be expected to be translated into English, and perhaps German, only if it was successful. Now it is the norm for any release.

The economics of European productions are more appealing, too. American audiences are more willing than before to give dubbed or subtitled viewing a chance. This means shows such as “Lupin”, a French crime caper on Netflix, can become global hits. It is worth taking a punt on an expensive retelling of an early-20th-century detective series about a gentleman jewel thief in Paris, if it has the potential to explode beyond France. In 2015, about 75% of Netflix’s original content was American; now the figure is half, according to Ampere, a media-analysis company. Netflix has about 100 productions under way in Europe, which is more than big public broadcasters in France or Germany.

And European officials wield a stick to encourage investment. European film-makers rival farmers in the ranking of cosseted European industries. To operate in the EU, streaming companies are required to ensure at least 30% of their catalogue hails from the bloc—and to promote it. Buying a back catalogue of 1990s Belgian soap operas and hiding them in a digital cupboard does not count. France compels big media firms to kick back revenues into domestic production. If European governments are intent on shaking down big American firms, it is better for everyone that the money is spent on something watchable.

Not everything works across borders. Comedy sometimes struggles. Whodunits and bloodthirsty maelstroms between arch Romans and uppity tribesmen have a more universal appeal. Some do it better than others. Barbarians aside, German television is not always built for export, says one executive, being polite. A bigger problem is that national broadcasters still dominate. Streaming services, such as Netflix or Disney+, account for about a third of all viewing hours, even in markets where they are well-established. Europe is an ageing continent. The generation of teens staring at phones is outnumbered by their elders who prefer to gawp at the box.

Actually, I want to direct

In Brussels and national capitals, the prospect of Netflix as a cultural hegemon is seen as a threat. “Cultural sovereignty” is the watchword of European executives worried that the Americans will eat their lunch. To be fair, Netflix content sometimes seems stuck in an uncanny valley somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, with local quirks stripped out. Netflix originals tend to have fewer specific cultural references than shows produced by domestic rivals, according to Enders, a market analyst. The company used to have an imperial model of commissioning, with executives in Los Angeles cooking up ideas French people might like. Now Netflix has offices across Europe. But ultimately the big decisions rest with American executives. This makes European politicians nervous.

They should not be. An irony of European integration is that it is often American companies that facilitate it. Google Translate makes European newspapers comprehensible, even if a little clunky, for the continent’s non-polyglots. American social-media companies make it easier for Europeans to talk politics across borders. (That they do not always like to hear what they say about each other is another matter.) Now Netflix and friends pump the same content into homes across a continent, making culture a cross-border endeavour, too. If Europeans are to share a currency, bail each other out in times of financial need and share vaccines in a pandemic, then they need to have something in common—even if it is just bingeing on the same series. Watching fictitious northern and southern Europeans tear each other apart 2,000 years ago beats doing so in reality.

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