Towns and villages in central Italy are rocked by the country’s most violent earthquake in decades.

…Giuseppe Pezzanesi, mayor of Tolentino in the neighbouring Marche region, said the small town had “suffered our blackest day yet”.

“The damage is irreparable. There are thousands of people in the streets, terrified, crying. Let’s hope that is an end to it, the people are on their knees psychologically.”

Italy quake: Norcia tremor destroys ancient buildings – BBC News

sigh…

Theresa May and Amber Rudd appear to have changed their minds about whether to hold an inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave since they last met campaigners, it has been revealed. After the announcement by the Home Secretary on Monday that there would be no statutory inquiry into the 1984 battle between police and Yorkshire miners, representatives of the Truth and Justice for Orgreave Campaign said the PM and Ms Rudd had sounded “really positive” about holding a probe.

Theresa May led Orgreave families to believe there would be an inquiry into 1984 clash | The Independent

hmmmm

People who wanted to find new lives. Instead they lie like cocooned caterpillars, desperately hoping to wake up to a different world. Others sit on the rubbish-strewn pavement, hunched in blankets. They too are rubbish, or so it would seem, according to widespread attitudes that have in recent weeks seen calls for children to undergo dental inspections to determine their age. 

…Give me words to make this picture real. …But this is an age of unparalleled harshness. Pictures of suffering pass us by. We narrow our eyes and close our souls. 

…There’s no bed to go to and no destination in sight. A camp that provided some kind of desperate community is being demolished. The people here are falling into a gap in the modern world. They look like they are bound for a homeless future. These are the people we have decided we have no space for, no interest in and no compassion towards. This is the result – people mingling with discarded plastic bottles in the streets of abandonment. For human beings don’t disappear, unless you actually kill them. They stand around, slump in blankets, lie wrapped up and trying to dream of somewhere better. Here they are – the unwanted.

…If history has taught us one thing it is that fear of the other is always irrational. There is no case in history when a wave of hatred was justified or grounded in fact. Yet such waves of fear and loathing can be so forceful and widespread that they appear completely sane to those affected, and are hard to resist. 

There was no rational basis for the antisemitism that made Rothko’s family flee Russia. Labour MPs who think the left needs to accept the current anti-migrant mood are utterly wrong because such moods can and do thrive independently of fact. Here’s the question: should liberals and socialists in the 1930s have recognised there were legitimate reasons for popular antisemitism?

So look, and weep. Not for them. For us.

Here lie the unwanted of Calais – an indictment of us, not them | Jonathan Jones | Opinion | The Guardian

Jeezus…

Thousands of people have been loaded onto buses outside the squalid Calais migrant camp and taken to asylum centres dotted around the French countryside in a bid by the government to shut down the so-called ‘jungle’ once and for all.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who is hoping to be chosen as his party’s candidate for the presidential elections next year, has attacked the French government’s plan for Calais – accusing them of having dismantled “nothing at all” in rehousing “11,000 unfortunate migrants.”

He told France 5:

“When I left the presidency, there were fewer than 1,000 migrants in Calais; now we talk about 11,000.

We haven’t dismantled anything at all. We’re taking the 11,000 unfortunates there, and spread them out in France.

Are we going to give them papers? I don’t understand this government’s politics.”

He said that 90 per cent wanted to get to Great Britain, and only 5 per cent were eligible.

He also said, falsely, that Britain returns migrants to Sudan and Eritrea.

“Great Britain sends the Sudanese back to Sudan; the Eritreans back to Eritrea. Germany does the same.

Parts of these countries are at war.”

When told by his interviewers that, according to the spokesman for the interior minister, the majority were eligible for asylum, Mr Sarkozy replied:

“If they were eligible, why keep them for five years in the Jungle?

If they were eligible, they should have been given their papers.”

 

Calais ‘jungle’ demolition: Hundreds of migrants abandon bus queues and head back to camp after processing delays

Why keep them for five years?

Why indeed,  Mr Sarkozy, why indeed.

(Oh, and Jeezus… Get over the whole Channel rivalry and stop shitting on the U.K. for no other reaso n than its there. Jeezus…)

Germany to Host Ukraine Peace Summit in Berlin – ABC News

 

hmmm

 

Nicola Sturgeon says there may be a case for second EU referendum

hmmmm

Clearly she has her priorities straight.

Norway’s Prime Minister Caught Playing Pokemon Go In Parliament | Huffington Post

heh

European Commission – PRESS RELEASES – Press release – Questions & Answers: the new European Border and Coast Guard Agency

hmmm