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Three deeply intertwined stories that drove political and social change this decade, and in time may come to define European political history of the 2010s terrorism, Brexit, and the migrant crisis.

The most politically turbulent decade for Europe since the end of the Cold War is drawing to a close but what will these ten years be remembered for?

It has certainly been a difficult time, if not the most difficult yet, for the European Union. The early years of the decade were dominated by the Unions enforced policy of ultra-austerity on its southern members, particularly Greece. Suspicion at the disregard the Union appeared to treat the citizens of some nations with after Greece was later reinforced when the European Union installed its own technocratic government in Italy in 2011, after the government of the day hadnt played by Brussels rules.

Following the collapse of the elected government of Silvio Berlusconi, Brussels made a former European Commissioner the Italian Prime Minister, creating the first of three EU-backed technocratic Italian governments. These moves and others continue to linger in the minds of Eurosceptics across the continent years later.

Yet perhaps even greater developments may colour memories of the decade the deadly terror attacks striking against European cities and peoples, the decision of one European politician to unilaterally declare the continent open to mass migration, and the all-consuming debate on Britains withdrawal that hasnt even happened yet.

As we enter a new decade, events that define the last:

The Migrant Crisis

RIGONCE, SLOVENIA OCTOBER 23: Migrants are escorted through fields by police as they are walked from the village of Rigonce to Brezice refugee camp on October 23, 2015 in Rigonce,, Slovenia. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Future historians may well remember the 2010s ironically as the Wir schaffen das or we can do it decade. This phrase, uttered by Germanys Angela Merkel in 2015 was in response to criticism that already prodigiously generous Germany not doing enough to help migrants.

That, and the expressions of Germanys so-called Welcome-culture were interpreted as an open invitation by many so many, in fact, that over a million illegal migrants and refugees are known to have crossed into Europe in just one year, with over 800,000 of them crossing into the continent by sea.

Germany opened her borders to all comers in 2015, de facto throwing the borders of Europe open unilaterally, and in doing so triggered the Europe Migrant Crisis. The summers news was of the enormous suffering caused by Angela Merkels carelessness the thousands killed on unseaworthy boats sent by ruthless human-traffickers making the most of her largess to make quick money and of great columns of people marching north.

While in a sane world the migrant crisis shouldnt have been possible, a combination of factors including the European Unions much-vaunted but now discredited open borders scheme and Germany suspending the EU laws which were designed to prevent migrants crossing the continent looking for the most generous country rather than the first safe one, meant it was.

At times, the through-flow of migrants heading north through the Balkan route and central Europe was so great the number of illegals being waved through national borders was tens of thousands every single day.

While some countries opened their borders, others resisted being co-opted into Germanys mass migration scheme. Hungary, one of the last stops on the way north and a key road and rail hub for illegals heading to Germany saw up to 10,000 migrants a day in mid-2015, but the completion of their southern border fence in October of that year saw daily arrivals suddenly fall to pre-crisis levels, more or less overnight.

Registered, known illegal immigration to Hungary fell from 391,000 in 2015 to just 1,184 in 2017.

As the left in Europe mourns the end of a decade which saw the collapse of their political movements and the rise of the populist right across Europe, it is worth noting far-sighted left-politicians foresaw what damage to their own credibility the migrant crisis would do. European Commission vice president Frans Timmermans who isstill in post and these days delights in meddling with the Brexit process warned in 2015 that unless the establishment could find sustainable solutions to the migrant crisis, there would be a surge of right-wing populism across Europe.

Terrorism

TOPSHOT Authorites inspect a truck that had sped into a Christmas market in Berlin, on December 19, 2016, killing at least nine people and injuring dozens more.Ambulances and heavily armed officers rushed to the area after the driver drove up the pavement of the market in a square popular with tourists, in scenes reminiscent of the deadly truck attack in the French city of Nice last July. / AFP / Odd ANDERSEN (Photo credit should read ODD ANDERSEN/AFP via Getty Images)

The 2010s for Europe was a decade pock-marked by the horror of radical Islamist terror, with a large number of high-profile, high-casualty attacks visited upon its cities and people, and dozens more intercepted by the security services before they could come to fruition.

Indeed, the decade began with an attempted attack fortunately for its intended target, failed on January 1st 2010, when a Somali migrant armed with an axe tried to kill Danish artist Kurt Westergaard in his home. The motivation for the attack is one now all too familiar in Europe Mr Westergaard had drawn a cartoon of the Islamic prophet Mohammed.

Later, nearly the entire editorial magazine of a French satirical magazine were gunned down in their own offices during a weekly meeting. Again, their crime had been to be undiscriminating in their lampooning, having made as much fun of Mohamed as of any other prophet or god. The vast majority of European mainstream media outlets chose to be cowed by the attacks rather than stand in solidarity with the dead, refusing to publish the images the men and women of Charlie Hebdo had been murdered for.

More attacks followed, and at an accelerating pace as the decade wore on. 2013 introduced Europe to a new kind of terror when a pair of Islamist converts rammed their car into a soldier on a London street and attempted to decapitate him with kitchen knives. While the name of Drummer Lee Rigby lives on, the car-knife attack became the weapon of choice for Islamist killers this decade and is now better known to ordinary people across Europe. Requiring no complex planning or acquiring illegal weapons or explosives, the method was promoted by the Islamic State themselves as ideal for killing the unbelievers.

While many terror attacks against Europe were perpetrated by so-called homegrown radicals arguably a product of the doctrine of multiculturalism encouraging balkanised communities going their own way, rather than pulling together and integrating into national cultures this has not always been the case. The gunman at the 2014 Jewish Museum attack had fought in the Syrian civil war before coming to Europe, and some of the attackers in the 2015 Bataclan massacre in which 131 were killed with Yugoslavian AK47-clones and explosives had also fought in Syria, thought to have entered Europe while posing as refugees during the migrant crisis.

Taking the automobile method to its logical conclusion, 2016 saw two truck attacks, using the largest and deadliest vehicles on the road to kill the largest number of Europeans. In the French city of Nice on their national day, a Tunisian migrant drove a rented 19-ton truck into crowds enjoying a seafront promenade party. Driving at over 50 miles an hour, 86 were killed.

This was followed up months later when a failed asylum seeker who too had come to Europe on a migrant boat murdered the Polish driver of a semi-truck and used the hijacked vehicle to drive through the Berlin Christmas market, killing 11.

The late part of the decade also saw a string of attacks in the United Kingdom. There was a vehicle-knife attack in Westminster in March 2017 which culminated in a police officer being stabbed to death inside the British Parliaments own walls, and the Manchester arena bombing which targeted children and their parents as they left an Ariana Grande concert which killed 22 and injured over 800.

Then London was revisited with another vehicle-knife attack at London Bridge later that year, where eight died. The scene would be targeted a second time in 2019 with yet another attack as a recently released extremist went on a knife rampage before being subdued by members of the public armed with improvised weapons.

The routine responses to these attacks has, too, become part of the grim background of European urban life in the 2010s the inevitable Love [insert city name] posters, teddy bears and tealights. Anti-terrorism barriers and police officers dressed like military special forces are now an apparently permanent feature of our streets. But as London mayor Sadiq Khan likes to point out, its all part and parcel of living in a big city.

Brexit

WESTERHAM, ENGLAND JUNE 23: Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP and Vote Leave campaigner holds up the Daily Express as he returns to his home after buying newspapers of the United Kingdom on June 23, 2016 in Westerham, England. The United Kingdom is going to the polls to decide whether or not the country wishes to remain within the European Union. (Photo by Mary Turner/Getty Images)

If the 2010s were the Brexit decade, then Nigel Farage must have been the man of the decade. What other individual can claim to have had such a profound and widely felt impact on the whole continent in the past ten years quite apart from how it has utterly dominated British politics, Brexit has near totally paralysed the European Union itself.

Every major European summit for years has been consumed by Brexit discussion, repeated Brexit deadlines and the false sense of urgency that always accompanies the down-to-the-wire negotiations Brussels runs on have run roughshod over every other concern. Most frustrated by this has clearly been Frances Emmanuel Macron, who clearly saw his domestic rise to power as an insignificant stepping stone on his mission to totally reform Europe.

Hence his being by far the keenest European leader to get Britain out of Europeas soon as possible if his poll ratings are anything to go by his time as French president are numbered and with that his chance to make his mark on history. This is all great news for the actual people of Europe, of course, who might take the view the less Eurocrats in Brussels are capable of actually doing the happier and easier their day to day lives can be.

Brexit itself had been on the slow-boil for decades, the nascent Eurosceptic movement having all but vanished in 1973 after the county voted to stay in the European community on the basis of a pack of half-truths from then Prime-Minister Ted Heath who withheld the truth he knew about the future direction of Europe getting a kick-start with the Maastricht treaty in 1992. Signing the European Union into existence, the push by the British government to support the move and take the country into ever-closer union with Europe all but split the Conservative party.

Nigel Farage then an unknown was one of many to leave the Conservatives at the time over their direction on Europe. A founding member of the UK Independence Party in 1993, Mr Farage has been a persistent character of this decade, having come to national attention after suffering a broken sternum, broken ribs, and punctured lung in an air-crash on the morning of the 2010 general election.

While all will remember the 2016 referendum, 2014 was the year Britains fortunes turned with respect to the European Union. In the European Union parliament elections of that year, UKIP became the first party other than Labour or the Conservatives to win a national election in over a century, setting alarm bells ringing among the establishment parties in Westminster.

Desperate to not have his leadership torn apart by the European issue as it has John Majors in 1992, then Prime Minister David Cameron promised an in-out referendum on Britains membership of the European Union as a means to appease Eurosceptics in the 2015 general election. This was an easy promise for Mr Cameron to make neither he nor the pollsters expected him to win the vote outright, and another coalition government would give him ample opportunity to renege on the pledge.

Yet he romped home with 24 more seats, so Mr Cameron gave Britain the referendum hed promised. Again an easy decision for him the Prime Minister, all his colleagues, the people they socialised with, other world leaders, and the pollsters all believed hed easily win the vote, and in doing so would put the issue of Europe to bed for another generation. To make the gamble a sure one, the government threw its full weight behind the remain side, wrote to every household in the country explaining why the European Union is a good thing, and indulged in what was then called project fear.

Well, we know how that went. Yet almost four years later the United Kingdom still hasnt left the European Union but seems all but certain to do so and new Prime Minister Boris Johnson is promising a decade of growth, prosperity and Brexit.

Happy new year!

The rest is here:
Terrorism, Brexit, and the Migrant Crisis: Three Stories That Defined the Decade - Breitbart

AS we turn over a new page for 2020, what will you be reading?

Could it be the hugely anticipated Hilary Mantel or the latest from Anne Enright? The latest contemporary tales from Marian Keyes or Colum McCanns new novel, which was inspired by true events?

Whatever you fancy, there will be plenty to keep book clubs busy and create a bestselling buzz.

Waterstones fiction buyer Bea Carvalho predicts the biggest book for 2020 is likely to be The Mirror And The Light by Hilary Mantel (Mar 5, 4th Estate), the conclusion to her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. The first two, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and 2012 and Carvalho reckons this one may well be up for another award.

Its already pre-ordering really well and we will launch it with all the fanfare we did for The Testaments in 2019, she says.

In terms of big brand orders, we have a new book from Marian Keyes called Grown Ups (Feb 6, Michael Joseph), which will be our lead mass market title.

In her latest novel, she turns her attention to the issue of what it means to be a grown up in the modern world, and explores what happens when people just dont behave like them, starting with a family birthday party in which a single careless remark leads to the spilling of further secrets.

New literary fiction will include Utopia Avenue (Jun 2, Sceptre) from Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell.

Its a look at the music scene in Sixties Soho. Its his first new title in a while, which is very exciting, says Carvalho.

Other lead titles will include Apeirogon by Colum McCann (Feb 26, Bloomsbury), a novel inspired by a true story about two men - one Israeli and one Palestinian - who both lost daughters in the conflict and who form an unexpected friendship.

Elsewhere, there are new literary fiction titles from Anne Enright (Actress, Feb 20, Jonathan Cape), Anne Tyler (Redhead By The Side Of The Road, Chatto & Windus, Apr 9) and Rose Tremain (Islands Of Mercy, May 28, Chatto & Windus).

Look out for a new title called A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry (Mar 19, Faber & Faber), a spin-off from one of his previous bestsellers, she recommends.

Theres no slowing down in the popularity of crime fiction and 2020 will be no exception, with a new book from Jeffery Deaver, The Goodbye Man, his second in the Colter Shaw series (May 14, HarperCollins), in which the reward-seeker who helps police solve crimes travels to the wilderness of Washington State to investigate a mysterious cult.

Look out for You Are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen (Mar 5, Macmillan), about a woman in dead end job, unfulfilled and looking for love who wants to belong. Then she meets two glamorous sisters who invite her into their circle and initially, life seems to get better. But they are not what they seem.

It follows the huge success of their previous thrillers The Wife Between Us and An Anonymous Girl.

In science fiction, theres the eighth in the bestselling Rivers of London series from Ben Aaronovitch, False Value (Feb 20, Gollancz), as well as House Of Earth And Blood (Mar 3, Bloomsbury), the first in a new Crescent City series by bestselling author Sarah J Mass. Its a modern fantasy set in a divided city which sees heroine Bryce Quinlan investigate her best friends murder, with help from an enslaved fallen angel.

A debut which is garnering great reviews in America is American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins (Jan 21, Tinder Press), an incredible book about the Mexican migrant crisis and the experience of making the journey from Mexico to the United States. We think this could be the launch of a really impressive career. It could be a huge word of mouth hit, says Carvalho.

The novel follows a mother and her young son as they flee across Mexico to escape the drug cartel which has murdered the rest of their family.

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell (Mar 31, 4th Estate) is another American title that has already attracted a lot of attention, she adds. Its a disturbing tale about the grooming of a vulnerable 15-year-old girl by her English teacher.

Others we are excited about include The Mercies (Feb 6, Picador), a debut adult novel from Kiran Millwood Hargrave, who is a very successful author of childrens and young adult books.

Based on the real-life witch hunts of 1621, its set on a Nordic island where all the men have gone out to sea and died, and its about the community of women trying to face the elements.

Big books for autumn include a debut novel from award-winning journalist Dolly Alderton called Ghosts (Oct 15, Fig Tree), about a woman who becomes the victim of ghosting when she takes to online dating, while her father is vanishing into dementia and her friends are slipping away.

The author has a large profile on social media and co-hosts a successful podcast, The High Low, while her first non-fiction book, Everything I Know About Love, was a huge bestseller.

Caroline Sanderson, associate editor of trade publication The Bookseller, predicts sustainability and climate change are going to remain big themes in books for 2020.

Adult publishers have lagged a bit behind childrens publishers in terms of covering this for the ordinary person, but they are going to address it in 2020.

Our House Is On Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis by Malena and Beata Ernman, Svante and Greta Thunberg (Mar 5, Particular Books) is likely to fit the bill, says Sanderson.

Its co-written by climate crisis activist Greta Thunberg, her father, mother and sister. Being Greta Thunberg, it will be big, she predicts.

Ex-model Lily Cole is also bringing out a title in this genre called Who Cares Wins: Reasons For Optimism In Our Changing World (Jul 16, Penguin Life), a rousing call to action that will leave you feeling hopeful that we can make a difference, exploring issues from fashion to fast food and renewable energy.

It amazes me that 75 years on, memoirs of surviving the holocaust are still coming out, says Sanderson. One absolutely brilliant book is Hadley Freemans House Of Glass (Mar 5, Fourth Estate). Shes done a lot of detective work as to what happened to her family, so its about her grandmother and three brothers.

Dresden: The Fire And The Darkness by Sinclair McKay (Feb 6, Viking) is likely to be one of the bestselling titles for fans of Second World War history, Sanderson predicts, with the author bringing readers a balanced account of one of the most notorious and destructive raids in the history of aerial warfare.

The heavyweights going head-to-head this spring are Michael Cashman, whose memoir One Of Them (Feb 6, Bloomsbury) charts his life from Albert Square to the House of Lords, and John Bercow, whose autobiography Unspeakable (Feb 6, Weidenfeld & Nicolson), covers his story from childhood to parliament and the speakership.

Others to watch include How To Be Narstie by grime artist, TV presenter and internet personality Big Narstie (Mar 19, Ebury) who has penned this self-help guide to modern life, drawing from his own colourful life experiences, and Just Ignore Him (Sep 3, Little, Brown), comedian Alan Davies early memoir of growing up in the Seventies.

Then, there is What Makes Us Stronger by Freya Lewis (Feb 20, Seven Dials), the extraordinary story of how 14-year-old Freya survived the Manchester bombings, and the loving community that uplifted and supported her every step.

Originally posted here:
The must-reads in publishing for 2020 - Echo Live

ENGLAND'S Muslim population has smashed the three million mark in 2019.

Some parts of London are now almost 50 per cent Islamic, according to analysis from the Office for National Statistics.

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If current trends continue the areas could become majority Muslim within ten years.

Official ONS figures for 2018/19 that were released in December show that there are 3,194,791 Muslims living in England, with over a third aged under 16.

English Muslims make up the vast majority of the 3,363,210 currently living in England, Scotland and Wales. They make up 5.9 per cent of the 2018 English population (55.16 million).

2018 figures show that London was home to nearly 1.26 million Muslims, making up 14.2 per cent of the capital's population. 74 per cent of Londoners are listed as Christian or a-religious.

Following the migrant crisis that started in 2015, there were reports thatIslamic populations would triple by 2050as refugees headed west.

However the Islamic community in England is relatively low compared to other religions.

Christianity (all denominations) is still the most popular religion in England by a long shot, with 27.9 million people identifying with the church. 21.5 million of us don't identify with any religion at all.

The overall English population sampled by the 2019 ONS survey was 55,318,085. There were 63,783,693 Brits surveyed in all.

The Muslim Council of Britain has been approached for comment.

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Originally posted here:
Muslim population of England smashes three million mark for first time ever, figures reveal - The Sun

The murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia (Malta, 2017)

Daphne Caruana Galizia, an investigative journalist, was murdered in 2017 and two years on the scandal has seen three senior cabinet ministers stand down and the countrys prime minister, Joseph Muscat, promise to quit in January 2020.

Three men are currently awaiting trial for the 53-year-olds murder, but the authorities have not tracked down who hired them. Muscats chief of staff, Keith Schembri, resigned after he was arrested by police over the killing. He has denied any knowledge of or links with the murder.

Herman Grech, the editor of the Times of Malta, told Euronews the case had presented many lessons that Europe now needed to learn, from the importance of independent media - which has led the breakthrough, he said - to the importance of keeping an eye on the institutions of all countries, even the microscopic ones.

From a social perspective it reflected the way the masses turned a blind eye to cronyism and corruption as it fed off the altar of greed, he said.

Brexit has cost two prime ministers their jobs, led to two elections in as many years and dominated British politics since a small majority of Britons voted to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016.

But while pundits at the time saw Brexit as the beginning of the end of the EU with calls for a French Frexit, a Dutch Nexit, and so on the opposite has in fact proved true, Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University, London, told Euronews.

Brexit has actually made some Europeans, who'd maybe forgotten quite how important the EU was to them, realise its value, Bale says.

Poll after poll now suggest that fewer and fewer European Union citizens nowadays show any serious enthusiasm for the idea that their country should follow the UK out of the EU.

When 195 countries signed the Paris Agreement on December 12, 2015, they made a promise to try and reduce the risks and impact of climate change. To do so, they volunteered to curtail their carbon emissions and work towards preventing a global average temperature increase of more than 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels. The consequence of breaking said promise: none.

The good news: climate policy EU-wide and within member states has actually changed, Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute Prof Dr Richard J.T. Klein told Euronews. On top of that, he predicts the European Green Deal will transform many economic sectors that create greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite the US withdrawal from the agreement, European countries are determined to stay committed. According to Klein, the deal will likely mark an important point in changing the narrative in Europe. Maybe we won't so much pinpoint the Paris Agreement per se, but we'll recognise the value of the policies and measures that the EU and its member states are and will be implementing in response to the agreement, he adds.

Even though both the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal are the right steps in the right direction, Klein also urges that societies will need to increase their efforts to prepare for the impacts of climate change, which is equally urgent as reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, the European Green Deal remains silent about this part of climate policy.

The #Metoo movement went global after sexual abuse allegations against Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein became public in October 2017.

As European Ombudsman Emily OReilly told Euronews: "The #MeToo movement was all about empowerment. It allowed women in Europe and elsewhere to speak up about their experiences of sexual harassment and know that the culture of silence and denial that previously existed was crumbling."

It didnt take long for the movement to become big in Europe. More than seven million women are estimated to have protested in womens marches worldwide since then. But the impact hasnt been the same everywhere.

Some countries, such as France, Spain and Italy, came up with their own version of the Metoo hashtag, such as #BalanceTonPorc in France and #Cuntalo in Spain.

In the UK, defence secretary Michael Fallon resigned amid allegations of inappropriate behaviour. Meanwhile, the effect in some Balkan and Eastern European countries, as well as in Germany, has been limited in comparison.

All in all, OReilly says the biggest change was public awareness. It also showed why it is so important to have women in positions of power, she added. For the first time we now have female presidents of both the European Commission and the European Central Bank this is a strong positive message for younger generations of women."

When Ukraine announced in February 2014 that little green men had started seizing facilities in Crimea, Vladimir Putin denied that the soldiers which were carrying Russian weapons and wearing Russian military garb were Russian. In April, he admitted that they were.

By then, a referendum had been held in occupied Crimea on March 16, with the dubious result of 97% voting to join Russia. The U.N. voted 100-11 to condemn the move, while the European Union applied sanctions. But five years on, Crimea remains in Russian hands.

Read more: EU to consider increasing sanctions on Russia over the conflict in Ukraine

The annexation may have been eclipsed by the war in eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian forces and Russia-backed separatists, which has raged since April 2014, but still poses a fundamental challenge to the European order, according to Steven Pifer, at Brookings.

Although Putin has held back from occupying the Donbas region, the annexation of Crimea has alarmed European former Soviet republics such as Lithuania and Estonia and reflects a greater polarisation in Europe, with the EU on one side and Putins Russia on the other.

While refugees and migrants have always attempted the sea crossing between Turkey and Greece and Libya and Italy in an attempt to reach Europe, during the first three months of 2015 the number of drownings in the Mediterranean rose to 1,687 from 60 a year earlier.

In April, an estimated 800 people were killed in a single shipwreck and the EU voted to expand its multinational sea rescue operation, Triton. Meanwhile, hundreds of boats crossed the Mediterranean, while refugees many of them fleeing from the increasingly brutal war in Syria walked towards northern Europe in their thousands.

Read more: How the English Channel became a new frontier of the migrant crisis

Since 2016, crossings have fallen sharply, but a byproduct of the refugee crisis has been a surge in support for far-right parties in Europe, with leaders from Hungarys Viktor Orban to the Alternative for Germany (AfD), to Italys Lega and Britains Brexit Party making opposition to migration a key electoral issue.

In 2019, the refusal to allow boats to dock and legal actions against NGOs carrying out rescues along with agreements with countries like Libya and Turkey to prevent migrants from leaving for Europe have had mixed results. Meanwhile, the deadly crossings continue.

In November 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych announced that Ukraine would not sign an association agreement with the European Union. Within a week, one million Ukrainians had taken to the streets, and in February after months of protests Yanukovych fled to Russia.

2014 saw the Russian annexation of Crime and the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine, and five years on Crimea remains in Russian hands and the conflict continues in the Donbas between Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces and militias.

Given that, many feel that the successes of the Maidan protests - named after the square in which they began in Kyiv - were few and far between. But they demonstrated to Europe that popular desire from Ukrainians to have a closer relationship with Europe - the protests in Maidan began under European Union flags - at a time when enlargement is a key issue for the EU.

Catalonias struggle for independence from Spain has exacerbated in the past decade. After a non-binding independence referendum in defiance of Spains constitutional court on 1 October 2017, nine of the twelve accused independence movement leaders received prison sentences for the crimes of sedition in October 2019. In the wake of the referendum, protests erupted all across Catalonia.

Kristian Herbolzheim, director of the International Catalan Institute for Peace (ICIP) told Euronews that Catalonias quest for independence poses a major challenge" to the EU on several fronts.

"At a political level, it is disturbing that one of the most important member states seems unable to address the conflict through political means. This creates a paradox, as the EU likes to profile itself as an institution that is happy to facilitate dialogue between conflicting parties internationally, but is reluctant to get involved in affairs that are considered internal to the member states.

On top of that, Spain is blocking Kosovos access to the EU on the grounds of not setting a precedent for regions such as Catalonia. This may also have implications if Scotland has a new referendum leading to independence.

All in all the conflict is calling to revisit the concepts of sovereignty and democracy within the EU in the 21st Century. Both those in favour and against Catalan independence are largely pro-EU. This should incentivise the EU to find a creative way of playing some sort of constructive role, Herbholzheim added.

After lengthy negotiations, Iran agreed to a deal for its nuclear programme with the US, UK, France, China, Russia and Germany in 2015. Iran agreed to limit its nuclear activities and regular inspections by international experts in return for the lifting of economic sanctions.

Not only did the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal, provide Europe with a relatively high degree of certainty that Iran could not pursue a military option with its nuclear programme, but it also allowed European countries to pursue business interests once again with Iran which is of economic benefit to them, Xanthe Hall, co-director of the German affiliate of the Nobel Peace Prize winning organisation International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) told Euronews.

Read more:

France considering mechanism in Iran nuclear deal to enact UN sanctions

Iran begins injecting uranium gas into Fordow centrifuges why is this important?

In 2017 US President Donald Trump announced the US would abandon the deal and re-impose sanctions. As a consequence, the remaining partners came up with a way to bypass the US dollar and introduced a financial system of trade with Iran (INSTEX).

The US decision to leave the deal is one of the more significant wedges in US-EU relations Narges Bajoghli, Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University told Euronews.

Within Iran, the deal has solidified the narrative among more conservative political forces that the US cannot be a trusted international partner. It has also demonstrated to Iran that the EU cannot exert actual power vis-a-vis the US, even to protect agreements it adheres to. Overall, the fall-out of the deal after the US withdrawal will most likely be looked back upon as a time that led to increased tensions in the Middle East to the detriment of manyat the request of a few Bajoghli added.

European countries have been a primary target for terrorist attacks in the last decade. With the defeat of Al Qaeda and so-called Islamic State, there have been more attacks carried out by solo actors who affiliate themselves with certain radical groups who are Islamist, white-supremacist or separatist.

"The main change has been the rise of the inspired attack; an attack that is not the sophisticated result of extensive planning and central coordination, but rather one executed by an individual who has had little contact with the organisation that he or she claims to support, using everyday tools such as a knife or a truck," Richard Barrett of the Global Strategy Network told Euronews.

"The perception of marginalisation and the speed of radicalisation to violence are both by-products of the exponential rise in the use of social media and the ability of terrorist groups to wrap individual grievance into a wider conspiracy theory," he added.

Some of the defining events that come to mind are the 2011 attack in Norway, the Paris attacks in November 2015, the 2016 truck attacks in Nice and a Berlin Christmas market. The UK witnessed an unusual number of attacks, such as the murder of UK parliamentarian Jo Cox (2016), the London Bridge attack and Manchester Arena bombing of 2017.

Even though terrorism on a global scale is decreasing, far-right terror is on the rise in the West. According to the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2019, far-right terrorism has increased by 320% in the last five years. The report ranks the UK as the 28th most affected country in the world - the worst record for a western European nation.

Read more:Far-right terrorism on the rise in the West, bucking global terror trends

Nora Demleitner professor of law at the Washington and Lee School of Law Media told Euronews that editorial choices by media outlets have a substantial effect on the public's perception.

"The focus on Jihadist attacks remains high," she said.

"They tend to cover them substantially more than terror attacks inspired by other ideologies. That is particularly true for right-wing attacks. So the public likely overestimates the likelihood of Jihadist terror. Also, to note here the fear of widespread terror attacks tied to the demise of ISIS and the concern about returnees has not come true. Still, domestic fears have led the European countries failing to acknowledge their own citizens who are being held in Middle Eastern countries. The long-term fallout of that response remains to be seen. Most extreme Britain increasingly resorts to the revocation of citizenship."

Read more here:
10 stories that changed Europe in the last decade - Euronews

On the morning of 14 August 1945 towards the end of the second world war, 16-year-old Arek Hersh and 300 other Jewish children boarded a squadron of 10 converted Stirling bombers and took off from Prague. They were organised in groups of 30 to each aeroplane, with 15 sitting on each side on the floor. Hersh remembers it vividly: They cut us some bread, he says. We thought it was cake. They gave us each a piece and it was great. About eight hours later, they landed at RAF Crosby-on-Eden, near Carlisle.

The children were the first intake of a pioneering rehabilitation scheme, in which boys and girls from labour and concentration camps in eastern Europe were transported to the Lake District to find new families and start afresh. Their journey has been dramatised by the screenwriter Simon Block and the result is a timely and moving BBC film The Windermere Children, starring Thomas Kretschmann and Romola Garai, to be shown this month, 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

At 91, Hersh is spry with a mischievous sense of humour. For almost half a century, he spoke to no one about his Holocaust experience. Not to his three daughters, who are old enough now not only to have kids of their own but also grandchildren. Nor to Jean, his second wife, whom he married in the early 1970s. Eventually, around 1995, Hersh decided to write it all down. The words came excruciatingly slowly. Two lines a day, he recalls, when we meet at his comfortable home just north of Leeds. But I wrote it, and then after that I could speak, I could talk about it.

Before the war, Hersh Herszlikowicz back then lived with his parents, brother and three sisters in Sieradz, a garrison town in west Poland. His father was a bootmaker, much in demand for making officers footwear. When the Nazis invaded, they came first for Hershs father, but he escaped; they came back for his brother, but he also slipped away. That left 11-year-old Arek, who was packed off to a labour camp near Poznan to lay lines and sleepers for the Poznan-Warsaw railway, which would speed up the German attack on the Soviet Union. One of his responsibilities was to clean the room of the camp commandant, who every day would leave Hersh a hunk of bread on his desk. It wasnt much, but Hersh believes it saved his life. We started with 2,500 men, he says. Within 18 months, there were only 11 of us left alive. And I was one of them. Very, very lucky.

Luck is a word that comes up again and again in Hershs account. When he was sent to Auschwitz in 1944, he told the SS officer that he was 17 and a locksmith. He wasnt either of those things; he just wanted to suggest that he might be useful to the Nazis. So thats what I said, and they told me to go to the right side, says Hersh. And 180 children all went to the wrong side. And they were murdered.

The most gruelling experience for Hersh personally, however, came in the early months of 1945, when he was evacuated first on foot, in the bitter cold, to the Buchenwald camp in Germany and finally to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia on what he calls the train of damnation. A whole month on open wagons without food, says Hersh, shaking his head. We ate grass. I ate the leather on my left shoe to keep going. I didnt swallow but I chewed it.

Your first instinct is to try to think your way into their heads. But you realise thats impossible

Hersh was in Theresienstadt, expecting any moment to be killed, when the camp was liberated by the Russian army on 8 May, 1945. He was moved on to Prague and it was here he was selected for the Committee for the Care of Children from Concentration Camps, which was set up by the British philanthropist Leonard Montefiore, a leading figure in the Anglo-Jewish Association. Montefiore persuaded the British government to accept 1,000 displaced children aged eight to 16; the Home Office agreed on condition that the funds were found by the Jewish community. In the end 650 boys and 80 girls came over.

What kind of physical and mental shape must these children have been in? How do you begin to repair the damage done to individuals, who in many cases were the only surviving members of large families? How do you try to imagine what they might be thinking? These were the questions that faced the therapists and educators at Windermere who were to help them in August 1945. It was also a quandary for the team behind the new drama.

Your first instinct is to try to think your way into their heads, says Simon Block. But you realise thats impossible. I cant imagine what Arek, who was in four different concentration and labour camps including Auschwitz, went through. And not just for a day, but for years. You cant recreate that trauma; all you can do is reflect how their behaviour may have manifested some of that while they were at Windermere.

Hersh turns up the electric fire a notch and Jean walks in with a tray of tea, biscuits and cake, and instructs me with brisk hospitality to tuck in, because her husband will probably forget. On the walls are photographs of Hersh with the Queen, Prince Charles and Liza Minnelli. Oh yes, she dedicated a song to me one time, he says.

After landing at Crosby-on-Eden, Hersh and the other children were driven to the Calgarth estate in the village of Troutbeck Bridge. A mile from Windermere, it was a wartime housing scheme that had been used for workers from the Short Sunderland aeroplane factory, which had relocated there to evade the bombing. Dormitory accommodation was provided as well as single rooms for older boys, like Hersh. Each one had a bed, a chest of drawers, he says. There was everything you needed.

The Windermere programme is not as well known as the Kindertransport initiative, which moved nearly 10,000 mostly Jewish children from Nazi-occupied territories to Britain between 1938 and 1939. At that time, some British politicians, including former prime minister Lord Baldwin, argued that it was a humanitarian duty. I have to ask you to come to the aid of the victims, not of any catastrophe in the natural world, not of an earthquake, he said, but of an explosion of mans inhumanity to man.

Block sees clear parallels with todays migrant crisis. Windermere is a story of refugees and child refugees, he says, and I thought it was very pertinent considering what was going on at the time [in Calais] when we started working on it.

In 1945, the immediate priorities for the children were to get clothing and find out about their families. The Red Cross supplied clothes, but they were odd shapes and sizes, so many children walked around in their underwear for a few days until donations of garments from local families started arriving.

We started to live as normally as we could, remembers Hersh. Some kids brought us bicycles and they said, Go on, have a ride! We didnt understand what they were saying, but they gave us a bicycle. So we went on the main road, and we were cycling on the right-hand side, so they tooted the horn like mad, shouting from the cars. We didnt know what they were shouting at us. We couldnt speak one word of English! But we caught on quite quickly, and we went to the cinemas, sixpence per seat, and it was very nice and we made our own life and things were OK.

News of their families took time to trickle through. For some there was hope, even something close to a miracle. There is a powerful moment in The Windermere Children when one of the children is reunited with a long-lost brother, who he has been told has probably died. That really happened. Oh, it would be incredibly manipulative to have made that up, says Block. No, if you have that, you wouldnt need to make anything up.

For most though, including Hersh, there was only despair. He found out his mother had been gassed and thrown into a mass grave at the Chelmno extermination camp. Of his immediate family, only his older sister Mania had survived, having escaped to the Soviet Union. There is a scene in the drama where Hersh all the children, are played by Polish actors hears about the fate of his family and soon after breaks up with his girlfriend. I still had so much grief, he recalls. I had lost my whole family and I felt I couldnt worry about my girlfriend as well.

At the Calgarth estate, the children received no counselling. Instead, they were encouraged to swim in the lake, play football, and given basic English lessons. The thing about therapy obviously is that its only any use if somebody wants to engage with it, says Block. Almost the main point was to bring them together in one place where they could be with other people whod been through what theyd been through, talk about it among themselves if they wanted to.

That was certainly Hershs experience. There were three or four boys I had been with in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he says. We were always together. So I could talk to them, because they had a similar story to mine, but not to anybody else.

We just had to suffer, he goes on. Terrible. I had about 30 years of nightmares. Middle of the night, I used to get a nightmare and so on. It was only after he had completed his book, A Detail of History, in 1998, he says, that he finally began to heal. Its left me now. After I wrote the book actually, it left me then.

The Calgarth estate programme was designed to be a temporary scheme, running for four months, after which, the younger children would be placed in the care of foster families, and the older ones would live in hostels and prepare for work. Hersh moved first to Liverpool with his friends and then Manchester. He trained as an electrician, but eventually, living in Leeds after marrying Jean, he bought and let property, mainly to students. Somewhere along the line, in the 1950s, he shortened his name from Herszlikowicz, because he was fed up with having to spell it out.

Block, who also wrote the 2015 BBC drama The Eichmann Show about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, interviewed a dozen Windermere survivors and found that most of them were very eager to get on with life. He continues, They couldnt bury what happened to them completely because it would come back in their sleep, in their subconscious, but they wanted families and all the rest of that. It was when they retired and they had more time to reflect that it all came barrelling back to them.

Hersh is now involved in education, at schools and universities, and with the charity March of the Living, which each year organises a walk between the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. In 2009, he was awarded an MBE. When I first went back to Auschwitz, it was awful for me, he says. I couldnt get through the gate. But after three attempts I got through and since then Ive been going there with children and young people to show them the place.

These visits are clearly still not easy why does he put himself through it? Because I dont want people to think that it just happened many moons ago, and people forgot about it, he says. I talk to everybody, so young people know that what actually happened to me can happen to anybody. Thats the main reason I do it.

Block found that this idea of giving something back is a recurring theme. The Windermere children are the most patriotic people Ive ever come across, he says. Theyre so grateful for the chance they got to start their lives again in the UK, and they want to express that in many ways, by being successful here and paying taxes and raising their families here.

Hopefully viewers will think, Well, its not impossible to bring people here and help them rather than be scared of those who might be fleeing from terrible experiences. We can bring them in, help them and then thats repaid many times over.

The Windermere Children will be broadcast on BBC Two later this month.

On 27 January, Holocaust Memorial Day 2020 will mark 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Information on different ways to get involved in this landmark anniversary can be found here

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From Nazi camps to the Lake District: the story of the Windermere children - The Guardian