However, if the police start getting into the game then it shakes the confidence in the rule of law (did they at least solve some cases?). By not wanting to give ammo to the SDs they're stupidly arming them with political rocket launchers. Maybe this won't drive much more people into the arms of the SDs but it will certainly help to solidify their place.

Why do things have to get to extremes before adjustments -that are in turn extreme- take place? I think in our insular world we have gotten used to not seeing much ugliness. The delusion is that if we think, say, and do only good/pretty things the ugliness will stay away. But political correctness is not politics - it's narcissistic bullshit. While Rome is burning, while the fascists are rising, people are more concerned about e.g. the current cover of Focus magazine because "racism and sexism". BTW the cover is bad because Focus aestheticizes the horrible with its usual lifestyle bullshit.

_{Schengen is toast!}

New Statesman - Laurie Penny - After Cologne, we can't let the bigots steal feminism

In a perverse sort of way, it's progress. After months of dog-whistle xenophobia, European authorities have finally started to treat migrants as they would treat any other citizen. They have achieved this by choosing not to make a fuss when migrants are accused of raping and assaulting women.
[.....]
 I'll be blunt. I think some people out there are very excited by their conception of `Islamic' violence against women. It allows them to enjoy the spectacle of women being brutalised and savaged whilst convincing themselves that it's only foreign, savage men who do these things. If hearing that makes you angry, if it makes you want to smash my bitch face in and tell me I'm a whore who deserves to be raped to death by ISIS, then congratulations, you've just proved my point.
[....]
It's time to take rape, sexual assault and structural misogyny as seriously every day as we do when migrants and Muslims are involved as perpetrators. That means that, yes, refugees must learn to respect women as human beings. Citizens, too, must learn to respect women's agency and autonomy. Men and boys of every faith and none must learn that they are neither entitled to women's bodies nor owed to our energy and attention, that it is not okay, ever, to rape, to assault, to abuse and attack women, not even if your ideology says it's okay. That goes for the men's rights activists, the anti-feminists and fanatical right-wingers much as it does for religious bigots.

• The first reports already said that the perpetrators looked "North African", and the nationality of the first 23 identified suspects confirmed this: most of them are Moroccans, all but one of the rest North Africans, and one Syrian. (So contrary to the narrative of German xenophobes, the event had little relationship with the big influx of mostly Syrian refugees via the Balkans route.)

• The media also published police stats claiming that 40% of male Moroccan immigrants but only 0.5% of male Syrian immigrants become suspects in criminal offences in their first year. Furthermore, some expert claimed that groups of young men fondling women is a specifically Moroccan "custom" which even has a name in Arabic, and the problem was "imported" and has been known in France for years. Implied is that nothing pre-emptive was done by German authorities against a known problem.

• The (otherwise progressive) federal justice minister Heiko Maas/SPD repeatedly claimed that the Cologne event must have been a well-planned provocation organised in advance. But this was pure speculation directly contradicted by police who found no evidence of centralised organisation or premeditated acts (the perpetrators appear to have just gathered for New Years', drank a lot, and began harassment and robbery in smaller groups after police stopped them from rioting in a larger group).

• It's still a matter of dispute whether Cologne police would have been in the position to do more that night. But one thing is for certain: patrolling railway stations was originally the task of federal police, which has been commanded off to Bavaria  for the purely political border controls (the border patrols don't turn away any refugee, all they achieve is delays for cross-border commuters and opportunities of grandstanding for CSU politicians).

The perpetrators were recently arrived Afghan asylum seekers, so called "alone arriving refugee children". They get special privileges for being under 18, so it is rational for them to claim to be under 18. Their age is never checked, which means that many of them are 20, 25, 30 or even older. Yes, if that sounds insane to you, then welcome to Sweden.

This is not true. It is a common and long-standing talking point from SD, which has recently migrated to Moderaterna.

Åldersbedömning - Migrationsverket

Bedömning av din ålder som en del av din identitet

Om du saknar identitetshandlingar för att kunna visa hur gammal du är har du möjlighet att visa hur gammal du på andra sätt, till exempel genom en medicinsk åldersbedömning.

Varför är det viktigt att jag kan visa min ålder?

Migrationsverket vill veta vem du är, vad du heter, din ålder och var du kommer från. De uppgifterna är en del av din identitet.

Om du inte har några identitetshandlingar, om du inte kan visa din ålder på något annat sätt, och din ålder inte verkar stämma, håller personalen först ett samtal med dig om hur gammal du är. Det betyder att handläggaren pratar med dig för att utreda hur gammal du är.

Om handläggaren bedömer att du är äldre eller yngre än du har sagt, ändrar handläggaren din ålder i Migrationsverkets databas. Om handläggaren bedömer att du är 18 år eller äldre kommer ditt ärende att behandlas på samma sätt som för vuxna  asylsökande.Vad är en medicinsk åldersbedömning?  

Migrationsverket kommer att informera dig om att du har möjlighet att gå till en läkare för att göra något som kallas för en medicinsk åldersbedömning eller läkarbedömning av ålder. Det kan till exempel innebära att du går till en läkare och gör en handleds- eller tandröntgen. Sedan bedömer läkaren på ett ungefär hur gammal du är.

Åldersbedömningen är frivillig och det är något som du tillsammans med din gode man får besluta om och boka tid för. Migrationsverket står för kostnaden av åldersbedömningen när den lämnas in.

Migrationsverket kan ändra sin bedömning om du lämnar in identitetshandlingar eller på annat sätt visar hur gammal du är. 

Det går inte att överklaga den bedömning Migrationsverket gör av din ålder separat. Men om du överklagar beslutet i ditt asylärende, kan du även klaga på den bedömning som Migrationsverket har gjort av din ålder.  

Short version in english: if you claim to be below 18 and can not prove it by documentation, the Migration authority will decide how old they think you are, and taht decision will stand. The asylum seeker claiming to be under 18 has the right to a medical examination. The decision can not as such be appealed, but if the decision on asylum is appealed, age determination can be appealed in the asylum appeal.

The pediatricians association argues that the way the medical examination is handled is un-scientific and no longer wants to participate. This has not stopped the right-wing from demanding more un-scientific examinations.

If it sounds insane, check it.

They have probably never been exposed to such lascivious images, whether in magazines, billboards or tv, or the reality of overt prostitution, pole bars and revealing, titillating fashions that demand attention by appealing to the sex drive of the mating game.

Once they figure out how much of this courtship rotates around status signifiers, money, fine duds, fancy cars etc, things they feel they probably will never have, it's easy to imagine rage and frustration being predictable consequences.

Looked at like this, it seems similar to the looting that happened in England a few years ago. Workers who passed windows full of consumer goodies every day knowing they are extremely unlikely to ever be able to afford them, under cover of chaos help themselves to the 'forbidden fruit' dangled in front of them with little interest or consideration for how inflammatory these situations can prove for those with no social brakes, for whatever cultural reason.
If integration is to work it seems that some counseling in this issue may be in order, or this kind of event may become more frequent, especially as there are another million refugees expected this year to Europe.
It is much more probable that these bad actors are not recent arrivals, imo, possibly first generation children of immigrants who have no memories of war escaped from, and less gratitude to their adopted country, caught as they are in a socially unjust world they did not choose to be born into.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Widespread organised child sexual abuse took place in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England, between 1997 and 2013. Local investigations into the abuse began in 1999, although some reports were never finalised or made public by the authorities. In 2010, five men of Pakistani heritage were found guilty of a series of sexual offences against girls as young as twelve. A subsequent investigation by The Times reported that the child sex exploitation was much more widespread, and the Home Affairs Select Committee criticised the South Yorkshire Police force and Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council for their handling of the abuse.

An independent inquiry into child sexual abuse in the town, led by Professor Alexis Jay, was established in 2013 for Rotherham Council. The inquiry's initial report, published on 26 August 2014, condemned the failure of the authorities in Rotherham to act effectively against the abuse and even, in some cases, to acknowledge that it was taking place. It conservatively estimated that 1,400 children had been sexually abused in the town between 1997 and 2013, predominantly by gangs of British-Pakistani men. Abuses described by the report included abduction, rape, torture and sex trafficking of children.

Members of the British-Pakistani community condemned both the sexual abuse and the fact that it had been covered up for fear of "giving oxygen" to racism

New history GCSE course on migration branded 'disturbing' and 'dangerous'
The course suggests that Africans arrived in Britain before the English

[...]

Antony Beevor, the military historian and author, said: "Migration is a very valid area to study, but if it's a question of rewriting history to bolster the morale of certain sections of the population, rather than a scrupulous attitude towards facts, then that is a total distortion and it's outrageous."

While cross-national comparisons are difficult, as of 2010, Sweden -- welcoming, peace-loving Sweden -- had the third-highest rate of rape per capita in the world, at 63 victims in every 100,000 Swedish residents. Only South Africa, where widespread rape is a brutal legacy of colonial rule and decades of apartheid, and neighboring Botswana were higher. Sweden does not keep official statistics on the ethnic backgrounds of attackers, but two studies by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå), an agency of the Swedish Ministry of Justice, are suggestive.

A study that Brå published in 2005 found that, among Swedes ages 15 to 51 between 1997 and 2001, immigrants were 5.5 times more likely than native Swedes to be charged with rape, though the study did not further distinguish by country of origin. (Meanwhile, almost one quarter of all crimes were committed by foreign-born individuals, and another one fifth were committed by individuals born to foreign-born parents.)

A government study published almost a decade earlier found that, from 1985 to 1989, immigrants accounted for 61 percent of all rape convictions and that immigrants from Iraq, North Africa (Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia), and Africa (excepting North African countries and Uganda) were, respectively, 20, 23, and 17 times more likely to be convicted of rape than were native-born residents [...]

And, more to the point, findings in Sweden mirror findings elsewhere. In both Finland and Denmark, sexual violence is on the rise, and Denmark's government-statistics agency reported that between 2004 and 2010, one third of Denmark's convicted rapists were immigrants [...]

Sixty Percent of Women in Tech Say They've Been Sexually Harassed

We already know that when men behave badly to women in tech, women leave. But what happens to the women who stick around?

According to a new study called "Elephant in the Valley," which focused on women with at least 10 years of experience in Silicon Valley, the answer is depressingly predictable.

Women in Tech

The inspiration for this survey came out of the incredible conversation from the Ellen Pao & KPCB trial. What we realized is that while many women shared similar workplace stories, most men were simply shocked and unaware of the issues facing women in the workplace. In an effort to correct the massive information disparity, we decided to get the data and the stories. We focused on five main areas including: Feedback & Promotion, Inclusion, Unconscious biases, Motherhood, and Harassment & Safety.
[...]

•    65% of women who report unwanted sexual advances had received advances from a superior, with half receiving advances more than once
  
•    1 in 3 have felt afraid of their personal safety because of work related circumstances

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

Schengen suspended as army mobilizes

The Austrian Defense Ministry announced in new regulations on Saturday that it would be deploying troops to stop refugees who want to transit through Germany, and not apply for asylum there.

While Denmark waits for a proposal to pass, Switzerland is already seizing refugees' valuables

German politician Peter Dreier takes bus full of refugees to Merkel

An irate politician from Germany's southern state of Bavaria took a bus carrying 31 refugees to Chancellor Angela Merkel's office in Berlin on Thursday as a protest against her open-door refugee policy.

The Syrians, escorted by police, arrived after a 550-kilometre trip outside Ms Merkel 's office, where a dozen German protesters, unconnected with them, were chanting "Merkel must go" in protest at her line on immigration.

Peter Dreier, head of the south-eastern town of Landshut, acted on a threat he made to Ms Merkel last year when he said his municipality could no longer cope with the number of arrivals.

The report released Monday by the human rights group was based on interviews with 40 women and girls in Germany and Norway last month who had traveled from Turkey up through the Balkans to reach western Europe.

"After living through the horrors of the war in Iraq and Syria these women have risked everything to find safety for themselves and their children," Tirana Hassan, Amnesty International's Crisis Response director, said in a news release. "But from the moment they begin this journey they are again exposed to violence and exploitation, with little support or protection."

Women and girls traveling alone or accompanied only by children said they felt particularly under threat in Hungary, Croatia and Greece, where they were forced to sleep alongside hundreds of male refugees.
[...]

A 22-year-old Iraqi woman told researchers that a uniformed security guard in Germany offered her clothes in exchange for spending time alone with him.

This event (and more importantly the reactions) only confirms to me that we are after all nothing more than pack animals who are constantly jostling with each other for power and dominance. The true battle remains as it always has been: between males and females. And, as already seen above, the people involved become nothing more than cannon fodder in that age old battle. Sigh...

1. This incident did not involve one male but several
   
2. It happened in the heart of Europe and not out in some dusty hinterland
   
3. Male dominated institutions like the police did not react in any meaningful way.

So this time the news is that the media incorrectly reported that this was primarily a matter of lone refugee children from Afghanistan. And again it is not widely reported.

So perhaps it was the right call not to claim that this summer. Wheter it was newsworthy or not without the refugee-angle is another question.

A female TV presenter has described how she was groped by an unknown assailant live on air during the Cologne carnival.

Esmeralda Labye, a reporter for Belgium's RTBF, was doing a piece to camera when she was approached by two or three men, one of whom reached over her shoulder and grabbed her breast as she was broadcasting.

Yet another consequence of immigration, oh wait...