Right wing nuts worldwide.

printer said:

Just a few good old boys having fun.

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schuylaar said:

getting ready for 'the tour'.

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printer said:

August 13 baby.

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schuylaar said:

a Friday no less.

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printer said:

When do governments release bad news? On a Friday when everyone is in weekend mode. Do you think this time they will be covid conscious and wear a mask?

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schuylaar said:

thought i just saw 'mike lindell admits there is no evidence' headline somewhere.

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Mike Lindell is offering $5 million to anyone who can disprove his allegations of voter fraud — if they show up to his cyber symposium

Mike Lindell baselessly claims that Trump won the 2020 presidential election. He's offering $5 million to anyone who can prove he's wrong.

www.businessinsider.com

Waiting to leave Japan to seek refuge in Europe, Krystsina Tsimanouskaya said she hopes she can continue her career, but for now her safety is the priority. After she criticized the management of her team on social media, she accused officials of hustling her to the airport and trying to put her on a plane back to Belarus.

In the dramatic standoff, several countries offered help, and Poland granted her a humanitarian visa Monday. She plans to fly to Warsaw later in the week.

Team officials “made it clear that, upon return home, I would definitely face some form of punishment,” the 24-year-old sprinter told The Associated Press in a videocall interview from Tokyo. “There were also thinly disguised hints that more would await me.”

She added that she believed she would be kicked off the national team. She hopes to be able to continue running once she has reached safety.

“I would very much like to continue my sporting career because I’m just 24, and I had plans for two more Olympics at least,” she said. But “for now, the only thing that concerns me is my safety.”

Asked what made her fear she would be in danger at home, Tsimanouskaya said that “the key phrase was that ‘we didn’t make the decision for you to go home, it was decided by other people, and we were merely ordered to make it happen.’”

Reached by phone Tuesday, Dzmitry Dauhalionak, the head of Belarus’ delegation at the Games, declined to comment, saying that he has “no words.”

Earlier, Belarus’ National Olympic Committee told a state-run news agency that it was closely monitoring the situation and cooperating with the International Olympic Committee.

In the interview, Tsimanouskaya also expressed worry for her parents, who remain in Belarus. Her husband, Arseni Zdanevich, told the AP that he decided to leave the country when Tsimanouskaya told him she wasn’t coming back.

“It was all very sudden. I only had an hour to collect my things,” Zdanevich said from Ukraine, where he said he feels safe even though police are investigating whether a Belarus activist’s death there was murder. He hopes to join his wife in Poland.

The standoff began after Tsimanouskaya’s criticism of how officials were managing her team set off a massive backlash in state-run media back home, where the government has cracked down on dissent since a presidential election a year ago triggered a wave of unprecedented mass protests.

The runner said on Instagram that she was put in the 4x400 relay even though she has never raced in the event. She was then barred from competing in the 200 meters.

Tsimanouskaya waged — and lost — a legal fight to run in that event. The Court of Arbitration for Sport said in a statement that it denied Tsimanouskaya’s request for an interim ruling that would have allowed her to run at the Olympic Stadium on Monday. The heats were held in the morning and the semifinals were in the evening.

On Tuesday, Tsimanouskaya called on international sports authorities “to investigate the situation, who gave the order, who actually took the decision that I can’t compete any more.” She suggested possible “sanctions against the head coach who approached me and who deprived me of the right to compete in the Olympic Games.”

At the same time, she said that “the athletes aren’t guilty of anything, and they should keep competing.”

Belarus’ authoritarian government has at times gone to extremes in its crackdown on dissent, including recently diverting a plane to the capital of Minsk and arresting a journalist aboard. Authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko maintained that there was a bomb threat against the flight, but European officials denounced the move as an act of air piracy.

Lukashenko appears to have a particular interest in his country’s Olympic team: He and his son, Viktor, have led the Belarus National Olympic Committee for more than 25 years.

Both Lukashenkos are banned from the Tokyo Olympics by the IOC, which investigated complaints from athletes that they faced reprisals and intimidation during the crackdown following the wave of anti-government protests over the last year.

Athletes seeking asylum at global sporting events is nothing new — such requests were especially frequent during the Cold War but they have also happened occasionally in the decades since.

But Tsimanouskaya’s circumstances appear to differ from the typical situation, though some, including her head coach, have suggested she was planning something all along. Tsimanouskaya dismissed that, saying she only spoke out when she learned she would be participating in an event she had never competed in.

“Everything that is happening now absolutely wasn’t in my plans,” Tsimanouskaya said.

Nabila Massrali, a European Commission spokesperson, denounced Tsimanouskaya’s treatment as “another example of the brutality of the repression of the Lukashenko regime that hits all categories of Belarusian society.”

Still, the athlete declined to link her problems to the larger struggle in Belarus.

“I don’t want to get involved in politics,” she said. “For me, my career is important, only sports is important, and I’m only thinking about my future, about how I can continue my career.”

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KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A Belarusian activist who ran a group in Ukraine helping Belarusians fleeing persecution was found dead in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, local police said Tuesday.

Vitaly Shishov, leader of the Kyiv-based Belarusian House in Ukraine, was found hanged in one of the city’s parks not far from his home, police said in a statement.

A probe has been launched, with police investigating whether it was a suicide or a murder made to look like suicide, head of Ukraine’s National Police Igor Klymenko told reporters on Tuesday.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is keeping a close eye on the case, according to his spokesman, Serhiy Nykyforov, while Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba promised on Twitter that “Ukraine will do everything possible to fully investigate the case.”

“It is of utmost importance for us to reveal the truth about his tragic death,” Kuleba said.

The Belarusian House in Ukraine reported Monday that Shishov had gone missing during a morning run. The Belarusian human rights center Viasna cited Shishov’s friends as saying that he has recently been followed by strangers during his runs.

The Belarusian House in Ukraine helps Belarusians fleeing persecution with their legal status in Ukraine, accommodation and employment.

In Belarus in recent weeks, authorities have ramped up the pressure against non-governmental organizations and independent media, conducting more than 200 raids of offices and apartments of activists and journalists in July alone, and detaining dozens of people.

Authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko has vowed to continue what he called a “mopping-up operation” against civil society activists whom he has denounced as “bandits and foreign agents.”

Lukashenko faced months of protests triggered by his being awarded a sixth term in an August 2020 vote that the opposition and the West saw as rigged. He responded to demonstrations with a massive crackdown that saw more than 35,000 people arrested and thousands beaten by police.

Belarus’ authoritarian government has at times gone to extremes in its crackdown on dissent, including recently diverting a plane to the capital of Minsk and arresting a dissident aboard.

The Belarusian House in Ukraine said in a statement Tuesday that Shishov was forced to move to Ukraine in the fall of 2020, when antigovernment protests and crackdown on demonstrators in Belarus were in full swing.

In Ukraine, he was under surveillance, and “both local sources and our people in Belarus” have alerted the group to the possibility of “various provocations, including kidnapping and liquidation.”

“There is no doubt that this was a planned operation by security operatives to liquidate a Belarusian, dangerous for the regime. We will continue to fight for the truth about Vitaly’s death,” the group said.

Yury Shchuchko from the Belarusian House in Ukraine told The Associated Press that Shishov was found with marks of beating on his face. “Nothing was stolen, he was in regular clothes people put on to work out, and he only had his phone with him,” Shchuchko said.

He also said that Shishov has previously noticed surveillance during his runs and that strangers would approach him and try to start a conversation.

“We have been warned to be more careful, because a network of Belarus KGB agents is operating here and everything is possible,” Shchuchko said. “Vitaly asked me to take care of his loved ones, he had a weird feeling.”

Klymenko of the National Police told reporters on Tuesday that there were indeed injuries discovered on Shishov’s body — scratched skin on his nose, a cut on his lip and an injury on his left knee. He wouldn’t say, however, whether these resulted from violence. Klymenko added that police haven’t received any complaints about surveillance from Shishov.

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Lukashenko’s main challenger in the August 2020 election who left for Lithuania under pressure from the authorities, expressed condolences to Shishov’s family on Tuesday.

“Belarusians can’t be safe even abroad, as long as there are those who are trying to inflict revenge on them,” Tsikhnaouskaya said in an online statement.

“Vitaly Shishov was helping Belarusians and was found hanged ... It happened on another country’s soil. Just like the hostage-taking took place on another country’s plane. Just like the attempt to forcefully bring a disloyal athlete back to Belarus from another country’s territory,” she said.

Earlier this week, Belarus Olympic sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya accused the country’s officials of hustling her to the airport and trying to put her on a plane back to Belarus after she publicly criticized the management of her team at the Tokyo Games. Tsimanouskaya refused to board the plane and instead will seek refuge in Europe.

In an interview Tuesday, she told the AP she feared she wouldn’t be safe in Belarus.

European and U.S. officials on Tuesday urged Ukraine to conduct a thorough investigation into the death of the activist.

“We are deeply shocked by the news of the death of the Belarusian activist Vitaly Shishov,” Austria’s Foreign Ministry said on Twitter. “Our thoughts are with his loved ones. Austria calls for a thorough and transparent investigation into the circumstances leading to his death.”

Marta Hurtado, a spokeswoman for the U.N. human rights office, told reporters in Geneva that the office hoped the authorities in Ukraine would conduct “a thorough, impartial and effective investigation on what happened and see if it was just a suicide, if it was a regular criminal murder, or if there is a relation with his activism.”

The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv said on Twitter that Shishov’s death “takes place amid an unacceptable Belarusian crack down on civil society, and we look forward to a complete and thorough investigation by Ukrainian authorities to establish its causes and circumstances.”

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hanimmal said:

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KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban fighters tortured and killed members of an ethnic minority in Afghanistan after recently overrunning their village, Amnesty International said, fueling fears that they will again impose a brutal rule, even as they urged imams to push a message of unity at the first gathering for Friday prayers since the capital was seized.

Terrified that the new de facto rulers would commit such abuses, thousands have raced to Kabul’s airport desperate to flee following the Taliban’s stunning blitz through the country. Others have taken to the streets to protest the takeover — acts of defiance that Taliban fighters have violently suppressed.

The Taliban have sought to project moderation and have pledged to restore security and forgive those who fought them in the 20 years since a U.S.-led invasion. Ahead of Friday prayers, leaders urged to imams to use sermons to appeal for unity, urge people not to flee the country, and to counter “negative propaganda” about them.

But many Afghans are skeptical, and the Amnesty report provided more evidence that undercut the Taliban’s claims they have changed.

The rights group said that its researchers spoke to eyewitnesses in Ghazni province who recounted how the Taliban killed nine Hazara men in the village of Mundarakht on July 4-6. It said six of the men were shot, and three were tortured to death.

The brutality of the killings was “a reminder of the Taliban’s past record, and a horrifying indicator of what Taliban rule may bring,” said Agnes Callamard, the head of Amnesty International.

The group warned that many more killings may gone unreported because the Taliban have cut cellphone services in many areas they’ve captured to prevent images from there from being published.

Separately, Reporters without Borders expressed alarm at the news that Taliban fighters killed the family member of an Afghan journalist working for German broadcaster Deutsche Welle on Wednesday.

“Sadly, this confirms our worst fears,” said Katja Gloger of the press freedom group’s German section. “The brutal action of the Taliban show that the lives of independent media workers in Afghanistan are in acute danger.”

Many Afghans fear a return to the Taliban’s harsh rule in the late 1990s, when the group largely confined women to their homes, banned television and music, chopped off the hands of suspected thieves and held public executions.

Thousands continue to flock to Kabul’s airport, braving checkpoints manned by Taliban fighters as they seek desperately to get on evacuation flights out.

Mohammad Naim, who has been among the crowd at the airport for four days trying to escape the country, said he had to put his children on the roof of a car on the first day to save them from being crushed by the mass of people. He saw other children killed after they were unable to get out of the way.

Naim, who said he had been an interpreter for U.S. forces, said he had urged others not to the come to airport.

“It is a very, very crazy situation right now and I hope the situation gets better because I saw kids dying, it is very terrible,” he said.

The Pentagon said Thursday that about 2,000 people were brought out on American flights on each of the previous two days, and the State Department said 6,000 more were expected to leave that day. But thousands of Americans and their Afghan allies may be in need of escape.

Dozens of other flights have already brought hundreds more Western nationals and Afghan workers to Europe and elsewhere.

Chaos at the airport itself has sometimes hindered flights, but getting to the facility is the major challenge. Germany was sending two helicopters to Kabul to help bring small numbers of people from elsewhere in the city to the airport, officials said.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison noted that Australian citizens have not been able to be evacuated from outside Kabul, and even in the capital the situation is difficult.

“The situation in Kabul does remain chaotic,” he said.

In recent days, some Afghans have protested the Taliban in several cities — a remarkable show of defiance that fighters often met with violence. At least one person was killed Wednesday at a rally in the eastern city of Jalalabad, after demonstrators lowered the Taliban’s flag and replaced it with the Afghan tricolor. Another person was seriously wounded at a protest a day later in Nangarhar province.

The demonstrations have come to the capital as well. On Thursday, a procession of cars and people near Kabul’s airport carried long black, red and green banners in honor of the Afghan flag — a banner that is becoming a symbol of defiance.

Meanwhile, opposition figures gathering in the last area of the country not under Taliban rule talked of launching an armed resistance. It was not clear how serious a threat they posed given that Taliban fighters overran nearly the entire country in a matter of days with little resistance from Afghan forces.

In addition to concerns about Taliban abuses, officials have warned that Afghanistan’s already weakened economy could crumble further without the massive international aid that sustained the toppled Western-backed government. The U.N. says there are dire food shortages and experts said the country was severely in need of cash with much of the government’s funds abroad frozen.

After the Taliban overran Kabul the market used by many in the capital to exchange money was closed down.

Underscoring the difficulties the Taliban will face in returning the country to normal life, trader Aminullah Amin said Friday that it would stay closed for the time being. There was just too much uncertainty surrounding exchange rates, how the Taliban might regulate the market, and the possibility of looting.

“We have not decided to reopen the markets yet,” he said.

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GÖRLITZ, Germany — Flanked by campaign posters promising a return to "normality," Alice Weidel, a lead election candidate for Germany's far-right group, railed against coronavirus lockdowns and what she said was "discrimination" against the unvaccinated.

Then she moved on to vaccinations for kids.

"Hands off our children," she said to cheers in Görlitz, Germany's most eastern city. The crowd had gathered for one of the last campaign events of the Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, ahead of national elections Sunday. The vote will set Germany on a new course after 16 years with Angela Merkel as leader.

The anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination mandate message is a new rallying cry for the AfD, which became the country's third-largest political force when it won 13 percent of the vote in the country's last parliamentary elections in 2017.

It did so then by stoking a wave of anti-immigration sentiment in the wake of the migrant crisis that saw Chancellor Merkel open the nation's doors to more than a million refugees, many of whom fled Syria's deadly civil war.

The AfD hasn’t abandoned its bread-and-butter issues of immigration and integration, which also feature heavily in election speeches. But after initially voicing support for coronavirus measures as the pandemic ravaged Europe, it has now put at the center of its campaign fighting what it describes as the overbearing rules.

What to know about Germany’s elections

The party is trying to capitalize on Germany’s ecosystem of coronavirus-skeptics, and infuse it with a far-right framing of the crisis, said Hans Vorländer, a professor at the Technical University of Dresden. That includes Querdenker, the covid-skeptic mass movement that encompasses a wide range of followers, including far-right radicals anti-vaccine moms.

“It’s a free-rider,” he said of the AfD. “The AfD realized that there was opposition to the corona restrictions in parts of the population and tried to make itself the leader of the loud and fierce anti-corona protests.”



Analysts say the inflammatory rhetoric risks violence, pointing to the fatal shooting of a young gas station worker in Germany’s west over the weekend, after she requested that a customer wear a mask.

So far the strategy does not seem to be helping the party in the polls. According to the latest from pollsters INSA, the AfD is projected to win just 11 percent of the vote.

“It’s a lot, but it’s not a danger for democracy,” said Hajo Funke, a German academic who focuses on right-wing extremism. “They will remain completely isolated,” he said of the fact that all other parties have vowed not to cooperate with AfD.

But the picture is different in Germany’s east, including Görlitz in the state of Saxony, where the AfD is the strongest political force and came close to voting in the party’s first mayor two years ago.

“We can count like this: one, two, AfD,” local Jan Kessens said as he pointed at random passersby from a park bench in Görlitz. “It’s every third person here in this city.”

The party is projected to win around 26 percent of the vote in Saxony, according INSA’s polls. That figure is comfortably ahead of Merkel’s Christian Democrats and just one point off its 2017 result. In Görlitz, the AfD won 33 percent four years ago.

Kessens attributes the AfD’s support here to low employment prospects in east Germany generally, which lag behind the national average.

“There’s no work, nothing to do, no discos, no parties, there’s nothing,” he said.

Nearby, the crowd gathered to watch Weidel and the party’s other lead candidate, Tino Chrupalla. A former painter and decorator, Chrupalla, 46, emerged as one of the AfD’s stars after unseating a member of parliament from the Christian Democrats in 2017.

Who will lead Europe after Merkel? The jockeying has begun.

Sylvia, 55, who had traveled from a nearby town to watch them, said that it was unchecked immigration that had prompted her to switch support from Merkel’s Christian Democrats to the AfD in 2017.

“Then there was also the corona pandemic,” she said, declining to give her last name even as she described herself as “open” about her support for the party.

The AfD is the only party talking about violations of the Grundgesetz, she said, referring to Germany’s Basic Law, the closest thing it has to a constitution. Complaints about perceived violations of the rights it enshrines are fodder for the anti-lockdown movement.



Germany’s decision to do away with free coronavirus testing to put a financial burden on the unvaccinated is “unfair,” she said.

The covid-skeptic messaging plays well here: Saxony has the lowest vaccination rate of any of Germany’s 16 federal states.

But analysts say the number of receptive ears are limited. And for Frank Klingebiel, the conservative mayor of Salzgitter in Lower Saxony, he’s more concerned that the AfD is the only party addressing issues of integration that he says is still of concern to his electorate.

His city of around 100,000 people had long hosted asylum seekers, including a sizable community of Syrians. But the abrupt influx of more than 6,000 people in Salzgitter between 2015 and 2017 overwhelmed schools and social services, he said. And in 2017, support for the AfD surged and it captured 13 percent of the vote in the city.

“In 2017, I was for the first time in my career worried about social peace in the city,” said Klingebiel. The mayor successfully campaigned German authorities to effectively ban new arrivals from settling in the city and Salzgitter ultimately received additional funding.

Klingebiel said that his goal was not to push Merkel’s conservative party closer to the far-right. He is in favor of more integration support for asylum seekers and worries about the momentum the AfD is experiencing in his city.

The mayor said that he is concerned Germany’s more mainstream parties have moved on — but that many voters haven’t.

In Görlitz, Chrupalla warned the crowd that Germany is facing a new “wave” of immigration, attempting to whip up fear that the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan could send new refugees to Europe. Earlier, a former police superintendent had railed about alleged crimes committed by “new Germans,” he said, or asylum seekers who were granted citizenship.

Petra Müller, 60, says it is the fact that no other parties are willing to talk about problems integrating new migrants that had pushed her to vote for the AfD for the first time with this election.

“I’m not against foreigners, but I don’t find it pleasant anymore,” she said, adding that avoiding the immigration discussion is “not honest and not good for the country.”

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sonnyjim said:

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sonnyjim said:

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sonnyjim said:

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Fogdog said:

My how dramatic your fantasy is. But my reality is better.

All we need to do is tell fascists to take the vaccine. By May 1, most adults could get it.

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Since May 1, more than 100,000 antivaxxers died and 3 million antivaxxers struggling with long haul Covid. Problem solved.

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DIY-HP-LED said:

I like to "counter troll", facts don't work...

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Fogdog said:

Well, just watch:

Hey, @PJ Diaz get vaccinated.

Now that I said it to him, it is certain that he won't. Antivaxxers are so weak minded.

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