A person was arrested on Tuesday for threatening with a weapon in a hospital in Montreuil (Seine Saint Denis), according to a police source.
At 08:15, a security guard at the Centre Hospitalier Intercommunal André Grégoire was called for assistance by a nurse who had spotted an intruder smoking a cigarette in a corridor. The security guard discovered the man in a changing room, where he was praying completely naked and shouting “Allah Akbar”. The man stood up and grabbed a sharp metal object, which he aimed at the security guard. The guard was able to disarm the attacker and hold him in a room until the police arrived.
The suspect was arrested without incident and taken into police custody. The hospital staff remained unharmed and did not press charges. VA
After dribs and drabs of criticism in responses to reporters over the past several months, Pope Francis finally came out with a statement about the full-blown assault on the Catholic Church from Nicaragua’s Marxist dictator, Daniel Ortega.
Pope Francis used his New Year’s Day address to highlight concern over the worsening situation of the Roman Catholic Church in Nicaragua as a result of a protracted crackdown by the government of President Daniel Ortega, which has detained clerics, expelled missionaries, closed Catholic radio stations and limited religious celebrations.
Speaking to the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the traditional New Year’s Angelus prayer and blessing, Francis said he was “following with concern what is happening in Nicaragua, where bishops and priests have been deprived of their freedom.”
He expressed his “closeness in prayer to them, their families and the entire church in the country,” and called on all Catholics to “pray insistently” to find “a path of dialogue to overcome difficulties.”
“Let’s pray for Nicaragua today,” Francis said.
Vatican News reported on Monday that at least 14 priests, two seminarians and a bishop had been arrested in recent days in Nicaragua, and that the country’s top church leader, Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, had expressed his closeness “to the families and communities who are without their priests at this time.”
Closeness? What closeness? The priests were right there, and now they aren’t. They’ve been whisked away to unknown places, kidnapped by the state, and are now ensconced in some communist dungeon where they likely are being tortured and abused. The guy in the capital, or in Rome, offering ‘closeness’ is far away, just saying he feels their pain.
It may be the right sentiment, but it’s not good enough.
The pope’s call for ‘dialogue’ is a doozy, too. Dialogue? It’s like negotiating with terrorists. Dialogue has been going on for a long, long, time in night-haunted Nicaragua. It’s the same call the pope makes to Venezuela’s and Cuba’s dictators who have destroyed their countries, thrown thousands into their own dungeons, driven many more to flee, and crushed all political freedoms. A lot of good that did — these dirtbag dictators are more powerful than ever.
A powerful condemnation on the world stage, as many previous popes have done with other cruel regimes, would do a lot more. Let Ortega mock Pope Francis with a question about how many divisions he has — so he can find out the hard way in this information age.
What the pope fails to recognize in this weak call for Nicaragua’s communist regime to play nice with the Church is that a full frontal assault on the Church has begun now. This is not a few objectionable things, this is a systematic bid to shut down the Church and chase it out of Nicaragua.
What does Daniel Ortega want in his arrests and kidnappings of these Nicaraguan priests? Well, to create terror, of course, to discourage any priest from speaking out about the corruption and poverty that Ortega’s regime has brought.
He also is tidying up loose ends, having jailed seven political opponents who challenged him for the presidency. In going after priests, what he wants is an end to one of the last groups of people who can speak out against him and his oppressive, rotten, socialist regime.
He’s long past the stage of being a social democrat, as he claimed years ago in his bid to persuade a new generation of voters to elect him, following his stint as a Sandinista revolutionary back in the 1980s, where by 1990, Nicaraguan voters threw him out.
There wasn’t going to be any of that in Ortega’s recrudescence that began in 2007, when he got elected again, and has extended to four terms, the last few of which have been universally condemned by the State Department and others as nakedly fraudulent.
What we have here is a full-blown Cuba model, Ortega being a lifelong ally of the communist regime there. The freedoms are gone. The opponents are jailed. The locals are fleeing. Now it’s time to shut down the churches, leaving just the all-powerful state as their substitute.
Cuba has that horrid model, and Ortega, who is getting on in the years, having reached the age of 78, undoubtedly wants to duplicate that model before he goes, and with weak Joe Biden running the U.S. up in el norte, he knows the time is now.
Surely the pope can see what is going on, and must know that it’s his Church that’s being gored now … and yet he doesn’t.
Is it the pope’s own latent Marxism that is making him reluctant to condemn Ortega, or think he can go head to head with Ortega and correct things with a little mano a mano dialogue?
Or is it the pope’s de facto support for the source of Ortega’s power, the global illegal migrant trade based on Joe Biden’s attractive nuisance, the U.S. open border, which has become a cash cow for Ortega, who is organizing charter flights from all over the world to ship migrants north at a pretty penny to himself. Ortega, as I noted here, has an actual plan to destroy the United States by inflicting millions of illegal aliens from all over the world upon it, and the pope has loudly supported this project, criticizing the U.S. for not taking all comers as un-Christlike despite wreckage of Nicaragua that drives Nicaraguan’s migrants out, and the wreckage of many places that are now shipping migrants through Nicaragua’s abetment. The pope never has any criticism for Nicaragua on that front, or for those places that drive migrants to leave. He only has criticism of the U.S. for not taking in all comers and paying for them.
Could it be that? Is the pope choosing the migrant trade to Get Gringo, and leaving Nicaragua rot, even if it means Catholic clergy are being ‘disappeared’ and tortured in Nicaragua’s filthy dungeons?
I don’t want to think that’s true, but it’s what comes to mind when one sees a weak response like this from the Vatican. The pope should be holding this hellhole regime up to shame and demanding the release of the kidnapped priests, citing the Argentine ‘dirty war’ or better still, the Castro regime as the disaster in the making. It shouldn’t place taking the U.S. down a peg over defending Nicaragua. The pope, of course, has spent a lot of time taking down critics of his own from the U.S., as well as wasting time on blessings for gays and other non-doctrinal changes that have the appearance of changes. While he’s been busy doing that, Nicaragua (and Nigeria) have been under full-blown attack.
What happens to a nation that doesn’t allow any churches? It becomes like Cuba, a desperately miserable place brimming with people with no social capital, no moral compass, and no future. It creates ruin, and that’s what we are seeing now in Nicaragua. The pope’s job here is not to make useless calls for ‘dialogue’ but at this point to state his outrage at what is outrageous.
Has Cologne’s popular funfair escaped a terrorist attack?
Three terror suspects arrested in North Rhine-Westphalia in July 2023 were spying on the Deutz funfair in the cathedral city as a possible target for an attack! This is according to reports from the Federal Criminal Police Office, which the newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger was able to read. Undercover investigators shadowed several men belonging to the terrorist organisation “Islamic State” on Easter Monday 2023. They tested numerous rides at the funfair and photographed the surrounding area.
One of the suspects raised his index finger in the so-called “tauhid gesture”, which is frequently used by Islamists, during a ride on a carousel.
The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Dutch judiciary had the nine people belonging to the “Islamic State” in the Afghan province of Khorasan (ISPK) arrested in North Rhine-Westphalia and the Netherlands in July 2023. Investigators are certain that the terror suspects, most of whom came from Tajikistan, visited the Deutz funfair “to clarify whether it was a suitable location for an attack”.
Explosive: The group was in contact with the men allegedly involved in the plans to attack Cologne Cathedral on New Year’s Eve.
Conservative media outlets and social media users are outraged by New Year’s Eve attacks on the emergency services—mostly committed by young Muslim men—which authorities and politicians have hailed as a more peaceful “return to normal” when compared to last year.
Authorities in Berlin described New Year’s Eve celebrations in the German capital as more peaceful than in 2022. “Only” 390 people were detained and 54 police officers injured. After last year’s riots—when mainly young men of an African or Middle Eastern background targeted and attacked officers, firefighters, and medical personnel with fireworks—Berlin and other major cities were much better prepared.
As we reported, German municipalities planned to deploy many more police officers on Sunday in order to prevent the levels of violence seen the previous year.
“Many months of preparation by police and firefighters … have paid off,” Berlin’s Senator for Interior Affairs Iris Spranger boasted on social media platform X.
2/3 „vergleichsweise wenig Verletzte bei der Polizei. Es hat sich gezeigt, dass die monatelangen Vorbereitungen von @Berliner_Fw, @polizeiberlin und meinem Haus in Sachen Prävention und konsequenter Intervention aufgegangen sind… ⬇️
— Senatsverwaltung für Inneres und Sport (@Innensenatorin) January 1, 2024
Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said it was clear that an increased police presence coupled with “an early crackdown” comprised “the right strategy against riots and violence.” A spokesman for the fire department referred to the situation in Berlin as a “normal New Year’s Eve.”
Though there may have been fewer injuries than last year, a leaked police report obtained by newspaper Bildreveals that emergency services had a tough night. In Berlin, for instance, large groups of young men deliberately targeted firemen, police officers and passers-by with pyrotechnics. Forced to wait for police protection, the fire brigade was at times prevented from extinguishing fires. Fire engines and police vehicles were also damaged. The situation was further complicated by a 2,000-person-strong pro-Palestinian demonstration on New Year’s Eve, where there were “chants against Israel and against the emergency services.”
A video posted on X by the daily Berliner Zeitung shows young migrant men shooting fireworks at other groups of people.
Police reports from other major cities paint a similar picture. In Frankfurt a police officer was attacked with fireworks by four people wearing masks. “One of the people was visibly carrying a knife,” according to a report, which called the situation “life-threatening.” The officer fired a warning shot into the air, and the perpetrators fled the scene of the crime.
In a separate incident, three arrests were made on Sunday in Cologne in connection with a plot to attack the city’s iconic cathedral. One suspect is a 25-year-old Tajik national, previously detained on Christmas Eve. Cologne police chief Johannes Hermanns told a news conference that they believed the perpetrators planned to strike on New Year’s Eve and that the “alleged means of attack” was a vehicle. Germany has been on high alert in recent weeks over possible Islamist attacks, prompted by the Israel-Hamas war.
Conservative publication Tichys Einblickdelivered a scathing verdict on the situation, reminding its readers that “in order to prevent riots, the police and municipalities had made almost desperate, sometimes ridiculous appeals to rioters, violent criminals and extremists to be a little more peaceful on New Year’s Eve this time than last year.”
In Germany, the dominant left-wing forces in politics, science and culture are still preventing an open, fundamental discussion about the secret turning point in the country. Yet it has long since changed or strongly influenced the lives of almost everyone, in kindergartens and schools, in hospitals and prisons, in companies and universities. The connection between the growing propensity for violence in society and the uncontrolled migration of millions from the Islamic world also remains largely taboo,
the paper writes.
German-language Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitungcriticised German authorities for calling the events on New Year’s Eve “peaceful” and a “return to normal.” It declared that while no one “should have to get used to” this violence, “in Berlin … there is a tendency to reinterpret antisocial behaviour as a custom,” the paper writes, adding that the worst troublemakers “once again confirmed all the clichés. Most of them were boys and men from the Turkish-Arab milieu, who often identify well with Islam and less so with Germany.”
Another Swiss outlet, weekly magazine Die Weltwoche also drew parallels between increasing violence and the large influx of migrants:
Anti-Semitic slogans were also chanted again, and something else stands out every year: women are increasingly nowhere to be found on the streets of major German cities. Men without an appropriate migration background are also seen less and less often. … Anyone who bases the success or failure of a New Year’s Eve on the number of injured or arrested, and is satisfied if there are fewer than in the previous year, has not understood the real problem.
German and Swiss commentators are incredulous at the official verdict that New Year’s Eve violence in 2023 was kept down to acceptable levels. Attacks on the emergency services being treated as the “new normal” bodes ill for 2024.
The Vatican announced Tuesday that Pope Francis has chosen “diversity in the Church” as his prayer intention for the month of January 2024.
“Diversity and unity were already very much present in the first Christian communities,” the pontiff remarked in his video announcing his prayer intention for January.
Diversity in the Church “is not something confusing or disturbing but is a gift God gives to the Christian community so it might grow as one body, the Body of Christ,” he added.
“If we are guided by the Holy Spirit, abundance, variety, diversity, never cause conflict,” he said. “The Holy Spirit reminds us first and foremost that we are children loved by God — everyone equal in God’s love, and everyone different.”
In an ironic twist, the pope underscored liturgical differences as an important expression of the beauty and richness of Catholic diversity, noting that the Eastern Churches “have their own traditions, their own characteristic liturgical rites, yet they maintain the unity of the faith. They strengthen it, not divide it.”
In July 2021, however, Francis clamped down on the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass, calling the practice divisive.
In his apostolic letter titled Traditionis Custodes (“Guardians of Tradition”), the pope banned the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass in Catholic parishes and revoked accommodations to priests who want to use the extraordinary form of the Catholic liturgy.
The letter reversed measures to relax restrictions on the use of the traditional form by Pope Benedict XVI, who, in 2007, noted that many of the faithful have continued to be attached with “love and affection to the earlier liturgical forms which had deeply shaped their culture and spirit.”
In recognition of this diversity, Pope John Paul II sought greater inclusiveness by granting the faculty of using the older form and “exhorted bishops to make broad and generous use of this faculty on behalf of all the faithful who sought it,” Benedict wrote.
Benedict went on to establish that the Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI “is the ordinary expression of the lex orandi (rule of prayer) of the Catholic Church of the Latin rite” whereas the Roman Missal promulgated by Saint Pius V “is nonetheless to be considered an extraordinary expression of the same lex orandi of the Church and duly honored for its venerable and ancient usage.”
On the contrary, Francis asserted that the 1970 Roman Missal is not the “ordinary expression” but rather “the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite” (emphasis added).
Pope Benedict had granted broad faculties to Catholic priests who wished to say Masses in private using the Roman Missal published in 1962, declaring that to do so “the priest needs no permission from the Apostolic See or from his own Ordinary.”
According to Francis’ restrictions, priests who wish to celebrate using the Roman Missal of 1962 “should submit a formal request to the diocesan Bishop who shall consult the Apostolic See before granting this authorization.”
“Previous norms, instructions, permissions, and customs that do not conform to the provisions of the present Motu Proprio are abrogated,” Francis decreed.
The Vatican’s own website asserts that “the Latin language still holds primacy of place as that language which, based on principle, the Church prefers, even though she recognizes that the vernacular can be useful for the faithful.”
The Vatican goes on to note that “Latin should be safeguarded as a precious inheritance of the Western liturgical tradition.”
The Code of Canon Law, which governs Church activity and liturgy, similarly stipulates: “The eucharistic celebration is to be carried out in the Latin language or in another language provided that the liturgical texts have been legitimately approved.”
Saint John Paul II urged the continued use of Latin in the Church to maintain ties with its own history and traditions.
“The Roman Church has special obligations towards Latin, the splendid language of ancient Rome,” he wrote, adding that “she must manifest them whenever the occasion presents itself.”
Pope Francis justified the reversal of the more inclusive approach of his predecessors by insisting that their pastoral kindness “was exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division.”
The pope’s love for diversity and inclusion in all things comes to an abrupt stop when faced with the traditional liturgy, which he seems to detest with particular vehemence. On several occasions he has referred to those who prefer the traditional Mass as “retrograde.”
Just last February, Francis further tightened the screws on the Traditional Latin Mass by insisting that permission to celebrate the old Mass may not be granted by local bishops, but must pass through Rome in order to receive approval.
David Guiraud, an MP with La France Insoumise (LFI), referred to “Celestial Dragons”, rich and privileged characters in the Manga series One Piece, to apparently refer to Jews in what many saw as an offensive way .
In yet another anti-Semitic controversy for the hard-left party, Guiraud reacted to a complaint against him for “apology for terrorism and incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence” filed by the Jewish Observatory of France, following its conference on Palestine in November in Tunisia.
Then, on December 31, he referred to “Celestial Dragons” portrayed in the Japanese comic-strip series as heirs of the founders of the “World Government”.
Said Celestial Dragons have been used as anti-Semitic tropes by trolls and racists on the internet for a while now.
The symbolism of the social-media post was not lost on viewers and led to outrage among many as controversy broke out.
On January 1, Guiraud deleted his tweet, saying: “A little message to those who follow me, because it seems that some people are using my tweet to go wild: let’s leave religion out of this. Celestial dragons are not a religion or a ‘race’ and if you think so, you misread One Piece.”
He continued: “It’s a military alliance of powerful people who crush others. They are not hated for who they are, but for what they do to others. But I don’t want to offend anyone, so I’d rather delete it. ”
Petit message à ceux qui me suivent car il paraît que certains utilisent mon tweet pour se lacher : laissons la religion en dehors de ca. Les dragons célestes ne sont pas une religion ou une « race » et si vous le pensez vous avez mal lu One Piece. C’est une alliance militaire de…
The LFI has repeatedly been accused of anti-Semitism since the attacks on Israel on October 7. Members refused to join the march against anti-Semitism in France, in November.
They were the only representatives of a major political party in France refusing to do so and cited the presence of the “far-right” as the reason.
Party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon has made several, at best, ambiguous remarks concerning Jews, claiming to champion the Palestinian side in the war.
Two days after the Hamas terrorist atrocities in Israel, Mélenchon charged the Jewish side with “preventing the solidarity of the French with the desire for peace” in the Middle East following a Palestinian protest just days after the attacks.
Guiraud appeared to downplay what had happened in Israel, saying the unconditional support for the country by the French speaker of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, was “a folly”.
In November, in Tunisia, he made the remark leading to the initial complaint: “We have political leaders in France who have completely swallowed, swallowed, all the elements of the language of the propaganda of a colonial state carrying out ethnic cleansing.
“It reminded me of an old saying that every accusation of Israel is a confession,” seeming to suggest that the Israeli State was lying about some of the horrors of October 7.
“That’s when I found myself saying, ‘Wait, but the human shields were used by Israel. We know that, it’s proven. Baby in the oven! … The baby in the oven was indeed made by Israel. The disembowelled mother, it’s true, was done by Israel … I think it’s Sabra and Shatila.”
The Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982 saw the killings of around 3,500 civilians – mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shias – in the city of Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War
Later, in a Q&A session, Guiraud criticised the “instrumentalisation” of “the question of anti-Semitism” in France with what he said was the intention of “extinguishing any criticism of Israel”.
⚖️Nous saisissons notre commission juridique au sujet des propos ignobles du député Guiraud, frappés au coin du négationnisme le plus crasse. Ni immunité, ni impunité. https://t.co/E7pe9z7on5
Even before the October Hamas attacks, LFI ruffled feathers by inviting rapper Médine to a summer event.
Médine, whose past remarks have been criticised for being anti-Semitic, is accused of remaining unapologetic despite the accusations.
In a tweet last year, he targeted essayist Rachel Khan, describing her as “resKhanpée”, referring to her Jewish heritage and Holocaust-survivor lineage. The “joke” played on the French term rescapés, which refers to Holocaust deportees and survivors.
A trans-identified male convicted of the grisly murders of two men is serving his 66-year sentence in a women’s correctional facility. Vietnam war and US Navy veteran Susan Monica, born Steven Buchanan, had dismembered the bodies of his victims and fed them to pigs at a 20-acre farm he owned in Wimer, Oregon.
In 1991, Buchanan purchased a 20-acre farm in Oregon where he would kill two handymen in 2012 and 2013 before feeding their corpses to the pigs he owned at the property. He was sentenced to a minimum of 50 years in prison in 2015, and multiple new outlets reporting on the case referred to Buchanan simply as a “woman,” without mentioning his transgender status or the fact he is a biological male.
“You shot two people and fed them to your pigs,” Judge Tim Barnack told Buchanan during sentencing. “I don’t know how else I can put it. You valued pigs more than you value people. It may sound harsh, but you are a cold-blooded killer.”
According to the Oregon state Department of Corrections, Buchanan is incarcerated at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, a women’s facility. He is listed under his feminine name, Susan Monica, and is described as being “female” in official records.
In 2012, Buchanan hired 59-year-old Stephen Delicino to assist him with tasks on the farm in exchange for financial compensation and accommodations. According to Buchanan’s testimony, the two became involved in a physical altercation after Buchanan discovered that Delicino was in possession of two of his guns. During a confrontation over the alleged theft, Buchanan claims that a gun misfired, striking Delicino in the back of the head and killing him.
However, Buchanan’s story regarding the death of Delicino was inconsistent. He variously claimed that Delicino shot himself in the head, and that he had shot the victim in self-defense — before his remains were eaten by Buchanan’s pigs.
What was left of Delicino’s corpse would later be found by investigators in plastic bags on the property, but not before Buchanan killed again.
The following year, Buchanan hired Robert Haney, 56, as a handyman by placing an advertisement for hired help. In the summer of 2013, Haney’s children became concerned when they could not contact their father, and filed a missing persons report with the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office.
Haney’s son, Jesse, revealed in a documentary for Oxygen about the killings that he visited Buchanan’s farm on January 1, 2014 inquiring as to the whereabouts of his father, and to retrieve his belongings. “We hadn’t seen or heard from my dad for two months. We just all started to panic,” he said. “His leather jacket was there. His dog was still running around and all his tools were there… It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.”
When officers initially questioned Buchanan about Haney’s disappearance, he told them that the handyman had quit and left the farm. Yet suspicions were raised when Buchanan was caught on security camera footage using Haney’s Oregon Trail Electronic Benefits Transfer card (EBT) to pay for items at a Walmart the day after he claimed that Haney had left his property.
Law enforcement officers executed a search warrant on the property and were shocked by the dilapidated conditions of Buchanan’s farm, which included piles of garbage, rotting food, and industrial waste.
“I would describe that property as eerie. There was a very strong order there, a lot of decay,” former Jackson County Sheriff’s Detective Julie Denney told Oxygen.
Steven Buchanan / Susan Monica, mugshot via Jackson County Sheriff’s Office
Then, investigators discovered the remains of a human leg. “It was clear that it was not an animal bone. It appeared to me to be a human leg that had been severed mid-femur, down to the toes,” Denney said.
Detectives brought Buchanan in for further questioning, at which point Buchanan told a bizarre story about putting Haney “out of his misery.”
Buchanan claimed that a few months prior, he had discovered his pigs in a feeding frenzy, devouring Haney’s intestines “with his guts all over the place.”
“He was being eaten, what I believed to be, alive,” Buchanan told detectives during the interview. “I put him out of his misery. I do that for my animals and this was the first time I did it for a human being and I knew it was wrong but if it were one of my pigs suffering out there, I would have done the same thing.”
State Police forensic anthropologist Veronica Vance testified that Haney had suffered three to four gunshot wounds to the head. His legs had been chopped off with an ax, though it was unclear whether this occurred before or after Haney’s death. Additionally, his thigh bones showed signed of having been gnawed on by an animal.
Buchanan stated that he didn’t inform authorities about the incident because he feared that his pigs would be put down. When investigators asked whether they would find anything else on his property, Buchanan drew a map with an “X” and said, “Right there. That’s where you’re going to find Steve,” referring to Delicino.
“I do not value human life very much,” Buchanan would admit during a taped confession. “My feeling is the only thing wrong with the planet is there’s people on it. If not for us, all the other animals, even dodo birds, would be here.”
The lead detective involved with the case told the court that Buchanan had admitted to killing over a dozen victims in a similar manner. “She told me that if she told me about the 17 others that she would spend the rest of her life in jail,” said detective Eric Henderson, referring to Buchanan as a woman.
Delicino’s daughter Eva told Oxygen that she also believed there were more unidentified victims.
“I think there’s more people… I don’t know what the motive would be… I don’t think that you kill two people in that manner and that it wasn’t premeditated. I think [he] did it to other people, too… and even the investigators believe that there are more people out there on [his] property.”
Buchanan was arrested on January 14, 2014 and charged with two counts each of murder and first-degree abuse of a corpse as well as one count of identity theft, the Mail Tribune reported at the time. Dozens of crime scene investigators searched the property, digging over 100 holes over the following weeks. Though they uncovered the remains of both Haney and Delicino, as well as the victims’ personal belongings, no other bodies were found.
A former cellmate of Buchanan’s at the Jackson County jail testified to getting “chills” after receiving a birthday card from Buchanan signed, “from the sweetest murderer in Jackson County.”
It is unclear how many men claiming a transgender status are currently being held in women’s facilities in Oregon state. As Reduxx previously reported, a man in custody for the brutal murder of his ex-girlfriend had been briefly transferred to the Coffee Creek Women’s Correctional Facility, but was quickly moved back to the male estate just weeks later for unknown reasons.
Zera Lola Zombie, born Daniel Lee Smith, has received a “vulnerable” designation by an Oregon Court, entitling him to special protections and privileges due to his gender identity. He is classified as a “female” inmate in the Oregon inmate directory.
Berlin’s trafficlight coalition avoided disaster on January 1st as the liberal Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP) narrowly voted to continue propping up the beleaguered Scholz chancellorship by a razor-thin 52% to 48% margin.
The smallest component in Germany’s threeway social-democratic led coalition, the fiscally conservative FDP, is noted to be increasingly at odds with Scholz and the Green Party, especially in light of a recent €60 billion budgetary scandal that sent German finances into disarray in November.
Approximately one-third of the party’s 76,000-strong membership took part in the non-binding resolution which, if passed, would have potentially heralded fresh elections in the country.
The pro-market Europhile FDP has been haemorrhaging votes ever since deciding to join the Greens and Social Democrats following the 2021 German election. Now, a grassroots rebellion is building over participation in the government. Supporters of the initiative view it as high time for the FDP to cut their losses on the coalition before they suffer permanent damage on the national stage.
Monday’s membership vote was the initiative of grassroots FDP members from the central German city of Kassel in response to the party losing official representation from regional parliaments in Bavaria and Hesse after poor election results in October.
The party’s chances of reaching the 5% threshold required to enter the Bundestag are now uncertain. Their low-tax voter base is in rebellion against continued support for the left-leaning coalition while the German economy continues to endure spiking energy costs and a costly green transition.
Despite the result favouring staying in the coalition, former FDP MP Matthias Nölke, who launched the petition, said that the party’s top brass were in dire need of an urgent change of strategy if it wanted to survive beyond the 2025 election.
Co-initiator of the vote Alexander Rackow directly linked the result to dissatisfaction against current FDP leader and German Finance Minister Christian Lindner in what could be the firing shot of a future leadership election.
There is some speculation that the FDP may use a bad electoral showing in the upcoming European elections as an opportunity to leave the traffic light coalition in a move that would force snap elections.
Both the centre-right CDU and the populist AfD are capitalising on the ruling coalition’s many failures around energy, migration, and foreign policy. Last month, AfD won a mayoral election in Saxony, giving the party its second mayor in Germany.
The plight of the FDP echoes that of Germany’s mainline communist party Die Linke, itself fighting off threats of dissolution as German politics continues to rearrange itself in the face of multiple internal and external challenges.
An Italian priest was excommunicated Tuesday for calling Pope Francis a “usurper” in his New Year’s Eve homily marking the first anniversary of the death of Francis’s predecessor Benedict XVI. Don Ramon Guidetti, a parish priest at Livorno on the Tuscan coast, was excommunicated by his local bishop for telling his flock that the Argentine pontiff, who took over after German pope Benedict sensationally quit in February 2013, “is not the pope, he’s a usurper”. Father Guidetti said later Tuesday that it was a “mark of pride to be out of this Church, which is a tyranny”.
A French rape victim, Claire, is speaking out to the press after she was raped by an illegal African migrant, saying that if he had been deported, the traumatic and brutal sexual assault would have never occurred. In her latest interview with French magazine Une Certaine Idée, she also notes that not a single left-wing feminist has spoken to her about the incident.
Une Certaine Idée asked her when she found out that the assailant was under an order to leave the territory of France (OQTF), she said: “The police told me when he was arrested. It’s even more revolting: Why is he still here? He wouldn’t have done this if this had been carried out.”
She also told CNews in a televised interview: “If we applied the laws, I would not have been raped by an illegal migrant under OQTF (a deportation order).”
To BFMTV, she spoke about her rape and the general situation around deportations of criminal foreigners, who are barely ever actually forced to leave France after serious criminal convictions.
“We don’t apply the laws,” Claire told a BFMTV journalist.
"On n'applique pas les lois": violée par un homme sous OQTF, Claire témoigne sur BFMTV pic.twitter.com/FRaGhwlRU9
Her case has caused a sensation in the French news sphere due to her willingness to speak not only about her rape but also to criticize the system that allowed it to happen. The same left that usually speaks of “rape culture” and claims to promote a feminist position, has gone on the offensive against Claire.
“The media — especially on the left — have distorted my words by saying that I wanted to get involved in politics and that I was far-right, but that’s not the case at all. I’m simply denouncing the facts I’ve experienced, and people can do what they like with them. But I don’t get involved in politics, there’s no political message. The left politicizes in order to ignore reality: No left-wing feminist has ever come to talk to me,” she said.
When asked by a journalist from Une Certaine Idée what she thought of the left’s position on immigration, she answered: “Their perfect world has no connection with reality, they are locked behind their golden gates. My message would have been different if I had not been raped by a man under OQTF, but I would have testified as well. However, since the rapist is under OQTF, the message revolts them, but it’s like that,” she said.
However, she was not the only rape victim that night, and in fact, the man had just raped another young girl an hour before the incident.
“The judicial police took my statement and told me that another young girl had probably been raped an hour before me by the same individual, only a 10-minute walk from my house. They were very cooperative, they’re very experienced. They were very professional. After that, you have to go to the Medico-Judicial Units, where you undergo a battery of tests,” Claire said.
She also pointed out that after the rape, she was not given or offered psychological advice:
“The next day, the full deposition lasted four hours. But after that, you’re out in the wild. While the police did their job very well, I think there was a problem with psychological follow-up. There’s no real system in place. They give you papers, of course, but that’s as far as it goes. There are very few psychologists available to the police. The psychological aspect needs to be taken more into account. The victim feels completely abandoned,” she added.
She added, however, that police quickly caught the perpetrator and kept her informed of the proceedings throughout the process.
“For the rape case that preceded mine, there were cameras that made it possible to identify the rapist. What’s more, he had left with my shopping bag, which contained tickets that made it easy to identify him. He was quickly arrested on the Champs-Élysées. I have always been well informed of his situation, from police custody to his current pre-trial detention at Fleury-Mérogis.”
Claire also said that the media — especially the leftist media — misrepresented her political position.
“I want to shake things up by speaking out, to make people understand that there are problems caused by the non-application of laws. I want to create a podcast that allows women who have been raped or assaulted to speak out so that their voices can be heard,” Claire said.
The French feminist collective Collectif Némésis has been actively exposing the dangers posed by mass immigration and the deteriorating situation for Western women across the country. Many of the women belonging to the group have been delivering personal testimonials of the sexual harassment and abuse they have suffered, especially from North Africans, also known as Maghrebis.
“Personally, it is always the Maghrebi types who follow, whistle at and insult me,” said Lea in one video from the group.
