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Javier E

Opinion | Belgium Shows What Europe Has Become - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...belgium-election-europe.html

belgium EU crisis right-wing

shared by Javier E on 03 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • In Brussels, the seat of the European Union, rising crime, pollution and decaying infrastructure symbolize a continent in decline. With unusual clarity, Belgium shows what Europe has become in the 21st century: a continent subject to history rather than driving it.
  • For a long time, Belgian politicians and citizens hoped that European integration would release them from their own tribal squabbles. Who needed intricate federal coalitions if the behemoth in Brussels would soon take over? Except for the army and the national museums, all other levers of policy could comfortably be transferred,
  • The upward absorption has not come to pass. The European Union remains a halfway house between national government and continental superstate. There is no E.U. army or capacious fiscal apparatus. Consequently, Belgium has been put in an awkward position. Unable to collapse itself into Europe, it is stuck with a ramshackle federal state
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  • As the ideological glue that allows Belgians to cohabit has come unstuck, the traditional parties of government have found it difficult to retain public backing. Amid a wider fracturing of the vote, Flemish and Walloon voters are now lured by adventurers on right and left
  • Belgium serves as a stern reminder that there are few bulwarks against the trends that ail European nations. The country is no Italy or Netherlands, where the far right is already in government, and party democracy and its postwar prosperity survive only as faint memories.
  • Yet even with Belgium’s lower inequality rates, higher union membership and comparatively stronger party infrastructure, the march of the far right has also proved eerily unstoppable.
qkirkpatrick

Belgium Marks WWI Execution of Britain Nurse 100 Years Ago - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-eu-belgium-wwi-war-nurse.html

belgium wwi execution nurse britain politics history

shared by qkirkpatrick on 23 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Belgium on Monday commemorated the heroism of British World War I nurse Edith Cavell a century after she was executed by the German forces that occupied the country.
  • Germany accused Cavell — the head of a nursing school in Brussels — of helping injured Britons escape, and shot her at dawn on October 12, 1915. Around much of the world she has largely been forgotten, but at the time the allied nations considered her a
  • Cavell was the head of a nursing school in Brussels when Germany invaded Belgium in 1914. She was sentenced in the very rooms of the Belgian senate where the commemoration took place and which the Germans had occupied during the war.
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  • "Her crime was that she had helped allied soldiers, British, French and Belgian escape to freedom across the Dutch border," said biographer Diane Souhami.
maddieireland334

Belgium shows off Russian plane intercepts - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Belgium Russia Plane Intercepts

shared by maddieireland334 on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • New photos released by Belgium give a close-up look at some interesting Russian aircraft that Belgian F-16 fighters encountered during a four-month stint as part of NATO's Baltic Air Policing mission.
  • The Russian planes intercepted by the Belgians included a Su-27 Flanker, a Tu-134AK, an Il-76, an An-72 and an An-12PPS, according to The Aviationist blog, which reported on the photos last week
  • In April, the U.S. accused a Russian Su-27 jet of doing a barrel roll over a U.S. Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance plane over the Baltic Sea.
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  • Russia denied its aircraft performed any dangerous maneuvers as it intercepted the U.S. plane.
zareefkhan

Gunman in Belgium May Have Been Radicalized in Prison, Officials Say - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-liege-gunman-radicalized.html

politics belgium prison

shared by zareefkhan on 30 May 18 - No Cached
  • One day after the assault in the eastern Belgian city of Liège, which further unnerved a country that was already on edge after two deadly attacks in Brussels in 2016, officials confirmed that they were investigating the case as possible terrorism, but cautioned that other factors were in play
  • “There are signs that allow us to speak of radicalization in prison,” Interior Minister Jan Jambon said about the assailant’s possible motives. “But it can also be because he had no prospects anymore in our society, as he also committed a murder the night before.”
  • Mr. Herman had been serving a continuous series of prison sentences for theft, assault and drug offenses since 2003.
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  • Mr. Herman may have come in contact with extremist inmates, investigators say, and converted to Islam, although no firm connections to a militant terrorist organization that might have helped or encouraged him have been established.
  • Belgian prisons are notoriously dilapidated and overcrowded, and in recent years some have become breeding grounds for extremism.Many of the terrorists who carried out violent attacks in Europe over the past three years had served short prison sentences for drug related offenses and other crimes, some violent. And it was often in prison that they began adopting extremist views.
  • In addition to the terrorism investigation, Koen Geens, the justice minister, said the authorities were looking into the decisions that led to Mr. Herman’s temporary release.
Javier E

Why a Belgian insurer studies the impact of air pollution on health | Air pollution | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...impact-air-pollution-on-health

air pollution trees effects study response climate policy

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • hy would a health insurance company study air pollution? Because, as Christian Horemans, an environment and health expert with the Belgian mutual insurer Mutualités Libres, explains: “It has an enormous impact on public health and an enormous cost for the Belgian compulsory health and disability insurance
  • The insurer’s recent study , carried out by a team that included Belgian and Dutch universities and research centres, compared health insurance claims from 1.2 million people in Belgium in 2019 with particle pollution in their neighbourhoods. The financial results were startling.
  • the study found associations between GP and hospital emergency visits and particle pollution (PM2.5), and when it applied the results to Belgium as a whole, researchers estimated that reducing air pollution to match the least polluted 25% of places in Belgium would have saved €43m (£37m) in GP and emergency hospital visits in 2019.
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  • “The lower the concentrations of PM2.5, the fewer people need to see the general practitioner. So improving air quality not only benefits public health, but also ensures the financial sustainability of the social security system.”
  • The study also found that more tree and grass cover in a neighbourhood was associated with less demand for GP and hospital visits. This was especially true of cities and accords with wider evidence on green space in urban areas.
  • The World Health Organization already recommends that we have access to 0.5 hectares (1.2 acres) of public green space, about two-thirds the size of a football pitch, within 300 metres of our homes.
  • The urban forester Cecil Konijnendijk recently suggested a 3-30-300 rule of thumb for urban forestry and urban greening – every citizen should be able to see at least three trees (of a decent size) from their home, have 30% tree-canopy cover in their neighbourhood and not live more than 300 metres from a park or green space.
  • “Based on these results, we need more, not fewer initiatives, like Barcelona’s Superblocks. Political pressure to reverse urban planning initiatives that reduce air pollution and increase tree cover seem ridiculous.”
Javier E

200 Years After Battle, Some Hard Feelings Remain - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...some-hard-feelings-remain.html

napoleonic wars history memory

shared by Javier E on 27 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • While the battle ended two centuries ago, however, hard feelings have endured. Memories are long here, and not everyone here shares Britain’s enthusiasm for celebrating Napoleon’s defeat.
  • Belgium, of course, did not exist in 1815. Its Dutch-speaking regions were part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, while the French-speaking portion had been incorporated into the French Empire. Among French speakers, Mr. Jacobs said, Napoleon had a “huge influence — the administration, the Code Napoléon,” or reform of the legal system. While Dutch-speaking Belgians fought under Wellington, French speakers fought with Napoleon.
  • That distaste on the part of modern-day French speakers crystallized in resistance to a British proposal that, as part of the restoration of Hougoumont, a memorial be raised to the British soldiers who died defending its narrow North Gate at a critical moment on June 18, 1815, when Wellington carried the day. “Every discussion in the committee was filled with high sensitivity,” Mr. Jacobs recalled. “I said, ‘This is a condition for the help of the British,’ so the North Gate won the battle, and we got the monument.”
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  • If Belgium was reluctant to get involved, France was at first totally uninterested. “They told us, ‘We don’t want to take part in this British triumphalism,’ 
  • “In no way will this be Anglocentric or triumphalist in any way,” said Michael Mitchell, an aircraft consultant who volunteers as secretary of the organizing committee. “We never talk about a celebration, but a commemoration,”
  • “Many brave men died,” he said. “All the belligerents played an incredibly impressive role.”
  • For Germany, the events are welcome. Next year, commemorations will mark the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, but unlike that war the Napoleonic wars are not something the Germans may feel they have to apologize for.
  • In 2000, a group of Belgian taxpayers brought suit, demanding that the government rescind an agreement dating back to just after the battle under which the Duke of Wellington was given the rights to 2,600 acres around the battlefield. The lands were bringing in about $160,000 annually for the Wellington family, and the taxpayers argued it was time to end the arrangement. The case stagnated until 2009, when the finance minister, Didier Reynders, told Parliament that the government had no intention of backing out of its commitment, which was anchored in the 1839 Treaty of London guaranteeing the independence of Belgium.
  • “Our concern is the experience of the visitor,” Ms. Du Parc said. “What is the message? What is the legacy, what purpose does it serve?” She contrasted the Napoleonic wars with World War I, which was followed only two decades later by an even greater war.
  • Mr. Jacobs agreed. “Still today, you find Belgians on both sides,” he said, “but thanks to the British this foolish Napoleonic experience was brought to an end. It changed the history of Europe.” “It brought a hundred years of peace,” he said.
sgardner35

More Than a Dozen Detained as Europe Moves to Sweep Up Potential Terrorists - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-arrests-terrorism-links.html

shared by sgardner35 on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • the Belgian police said on Friday that 13 people had been detained in Belgium and two in France after a shootout in which two men believed to be militants were kill
  • the authorities had conducted searches at a dozen locations where the police had found four weapons normally used by the military, including AK-47 assault rifles,
  • did not believe there was a direct connection between the events in Belgium and the carnage in France last week when gunmen conducted a three-day onslaught that left 17 people dead.
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  • detainees belonged to the “entourage” of Amedy Coulibaly, one of the three gunmen involved in attacks in and near Paris last week.
  • Mr. Coulibaly was accused of shooting dead a police officer on Jan. 8 and taking hostages at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris the next day, killing four of them.
  • In Germany, prosecutors said that 250 officers had raided 11 apartments after months of tracking a group that was said to support the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, with money and the recruitment of combatants.
  • As the waves of alarm spread, the only Orthodox Jewish school in the Netherlands was closed on Friday, Reuters reported, even though there was no specific threat against it.
  • Verviers is home to one of the biggest mosques in French-speaking Belgium, the newspaper report
  • The attacks last week provoked alarm, not simply about terrorism but also about a wider range of issues relating to the balance between liberty and security
  • The editorial director of Charlie Hebdo, Stéphane Charbonnier, who signed his drawings with the name “Charb,” was buried on Friday in Pontoise, near Paris, where he had lived as a child.
qkirkpatrick

Terror plan was to kill Belgian police on the streets, in stations, prosecutor says - C... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

terror politics

shared by qkirkpatrick on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • (CNN)Two terror suspects killed in a shootout in eastern Belgium this week were among more than a dozen people rounded up in across-the-country raids designed to stop a group's allegedly imminent attack -- a plot to kill Belgian police in streets and stations -- the nation's federal prosecutor said Friday.
  • The alleged plotters -- including two people killed Thursday night in a battle with police in Verviers -- were confronted in 12 raids across Belgium from Thursday into Friday, federal prosecutor Eric van der Sypt said.
katyshannon

Paris Terror Attacks: Officials Searching for Man Involved in Deadly Massacre - NBC News - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...ogether-assailants-ids-n463716

paris terror attacks officials searching massacre nbc news crisis history isis suicide bombers france belgium

shared by katyshannon on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • French authorities were racing Sunday to hunt down any potential accomplices to the wave of terror attacks unleashed in Paris as the investigation widened beyond this nation's borders.
  • A French man believed to be directly involved in Friday's massacre in Paris is on the run and the subject of an international manhunt, French security officials said Sunday evening.
  • Investigators said the man rented a Belgian-registered black Volkswagen Polo, which was allegedly used and abandoned by the hostage-takers who killed at least 89 people inside a Paris concert hall. advertisement He was identified by officials as Salah Abdeslam, 26, from Brussels.
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  • Abdeslam is allegedly the brother of another suspect currently in custody and being questioned — and of one of the deceased attackers, officials said.
  • French officials were working with authorities in Belgium, Spain and Serbia in an attempt to shed more light on the attack, which ISIS claimed responsibility for and which French President Francois Hollande described as an "act of war."
  • Less than two days after the attacks Sunday, French warplanes conducted raids in Syria, targeting ISIS' stronghold in Raqqa, the defense ministry said. Reuters reported that the operation was France's biggest strike against ISIS in Syria to date.
  • "The raid ... including 10 fighter jets, was launched simultaneously from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Twenty bombs were dropped," the ministry said in a statement.
  • The airstrikes, which were carried out in coordination with the U.S., hit a command post, a jihadist recruitment center, a munitions depot and a militant training camp, the statement said.
  • Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins said seven terrorists died in the attack on Friday. Officials initially said there were eight attackers — as did ISIS. It seems now Abdeslam is believed to be the eighth attacker.
  • A French prosecutor also said officials have identified two more assailants, whose names were not released to NBC News — a 20-year-old who was part of the attack on the Stade de France and a 31-year-old who was part of the attack on one of the restaurants in the 10th arrondissement. Both were French nationals living in Belgium.
  • "We consider this means they have a network," Francoise Shepmans, mayor of the town of Molenbeek where the individuals were detained, told Belgium's TV RTBF.
manhefnawi

France - The Directory | Britannica.com - 1 views

www.britannica.com/...The-Directory

French Republic Austrian Netherlands Napoleon United Provinces

shared by manhefnawi on 10 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • The spirit of the Two-thirds Decree haunted this process, however, since the directors believed that stability required their continuation in power and the exclusion of royalists or Jacobins. The Directory would tolerate no organized opposition.
  • As a legacy of the nation’s revolutionary upheavals, elections under the Directory displayed an unhealthy combination of massive apathy and rancorous partisanship by small minorities.
  • When democrats (or Neo-Jacobins) prevailed nonetheless, the Directory organized another purge in the coup of Floréal, year VI (May 1798), by annulling all or some elections in 29 départements. Ambivalent and fainthearted in its republican commitment, the Directory was eroding political liberty from within. But as long as the Constitution of 1795 endured, it remained possible that political liberty and free elections might one day take root.
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  • The Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium) and the left bank of the Rhine had been major battlefields in the war against the coalition, and French victories in those sectors were followed by military occupation, requisitions, and taxation but also by the abolition of feudalism and similar reforms. In 1795 Belgium was annexed to France and divided into departments, which would henceforth be treated like other French départements.
  • Strategic considerations and French national interest were the main engines of French foreign policy in the Revolutionary decade but not the only ones. Elsewhere in Europe, native patriots invited French support against their own ruling princes or oligarchies.
  • By 1797 Prussia and Spain had made peace with France, but Austria and Britain continued the struggle.
  • abortive revolutionary movements had already occurred in the Austrian Netherlands and in the United Provinces (Dutch Netherlands). When French troops occupied their country in 1795, Dutch "Patriots" set up the Batavian Republic, the first of what became a belt of "sister republics" along France’s borders.
  • In the process, northern Italy was liberated from Austria, and the Habsburgs were driven to the peace table, where they signed the Treaty of Campo Formio on 26 Vendémiaire, year VI (October 17, 1797).
  • The treasure coming from the sister republics was desperately needed in Paris since French finances were in total disarray.
  • In 1797 the government finally engineered a painful return to hard currency and in effect wrote down the accumulated national debt by two-thirds of its value in exchange for guaranteeing the integrity of the remaining third.
bluekoenig

Explore These World War I Trenches and Tunnels in France and Belgium | Travel | Smithso... - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...nnels-france-belgium-180963867

world world war i war france belgium smithsonian history culture

shared by bluekoenig on 11 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • bluekoenig on 11 Nov 19
     
    This article details some of the remaining trenches from WWI that can still be visited today, 100 years later, acting as a memorial and educational experience
Javier E

H-Debate on Versailles Tr. - Google Drive - 0 views

drive.google.com/...Y6IivTRpbhUV2GVDIqKfGnPvMsN5Rh

Versailles Treaty history

shared by Javier E on 25 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • She points out that the territorial settlement, which deprived Germany of 13% of its territory, 10% of its population, and 13.5% of its economic potential, in fact involved the transfer of much German land that “was French, Walloon, Danish, or Polish in population and culture” (652).
  • hose forced territorial cessions were much less that the huge swath of
  • Her main insight about reparations—which has been highlighted by Mark Trachtenberg6 and others-- is that the Allied leaders in Paris were caught in a terrible dilemma: they recognized that post-war Germany would be incapable of bearing the enormous financial burden of rebuilding the territories ravished by its armies during the war. But they also knew that their publics had been led to expect Germany to pay for the entire cost of reconstruction and would cashier any head of government who settled for anything less than full payment.
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  • territory that Germany wrested from Bolshevik Russia in the March 1918 Treaty of Brest- Litovsk and planned to force France and Belgium to cede if Germany had won in the west.
  • But Marks notes that no amount of reparation payment would have been acceptable to the leaders of the Weimar Republic because such payments were erroneously connected in the mind of the German public with the widespread myth of the “war guilt clause.” As she has reminded us in her earlier work, the word “guilt” does not appear in the notorious Article 231, and virtually identical language was included in the treaties signed with Germany’s allies. Yet the myth of the “war guilt clause” unilaterally imposed on Germany, which was propagated in the early 1920s by Weimar officials and opinion makers, has stood the test of time and continues to find its way into histories of the peace settlement.
  • They therefore resorted to a masterly sleight-of-hand: Under Article 231 of the peace treaty, Germany would be required to acknowledge full responsibility for the damage done. Article 232 would concede that Germany could not be expected to pay beyond its capacity. Thus, the Allied publics would have the satisfaction of knowing that Germany would be required to accept responsibility for the damage caused by its military forces in northeastern France, Belgium, and elsewhere. The Weimar Republic should have been relieved to learn that it would it not be required to pay a war indemnity or the actual costs of the war, as France had after 1871 at the end of a war in which no German territory had been damaged. Germany should also have been pleased to note that the reparation bill would be based not on the total amount of damage caused but rather on Germany’s economic wherewithal to pay.
  • On the question of Germany’s capacity to pay, Marks is merciless in dissecting and disproving the various claims of penury. “There are those, not all German, who claim that reparations were unpayable,” she observes. “After 1871, France, with a much smaller economy than Germany’s fifty years later, paid nearly as much in two years (by French estimate) to liberate its territory as the Weimar Republic paid from 1919 to 1932”
  • She points out that “Germany’s tax rates [in the 1920s] were abnormally low and remained so....Raising taxes would have provided ample funds, as the Dawes Committee discovered. Weimar could have borrowed from the citizenry, as France did after 1871.”Moreover the postwar German economy “was intact, having been spared devastation and denudation [which the major reparation recipients France and Belgium had experienced.] There were lavish social subsidies, unmatched by the victors.
  • In the end, as Stephen A. Schuker has shown, the Weimar Republic actually paid no net reparations at all, discharging its reparation bill with the proceeds from American bank loans and then defaulting on both reparations and foreign debts in the Great Depression.
  • So much for the claim that the ‘burdensome’ reparations requirement of the peace treaty led to the collapse of the German economy and the advent of Hitler.
katieb0305

NATO bolsters presence in Eastern Europe as Russia tension rises - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

nato europe russia

shared by katieb0305 on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The UK has deployed hundreds of troops to Eastern Europe as NATO continues to bolster its presence in the face of perceived Russian provocation.
  • "Russia has tripled defense spending," Stoltenberg told reporters.
  • "Russia has invested heavily in a modern military equipment. They are conducting a large-scale, no-notice exercises close to NATO borders, but perhaps most importantly Russia has been willing to use military force against neighbors.
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  • said Russia withdrew the request after the ministry had asked the Russian Embassy in Madrid to clarify reports the flotilla might participate in military operations against the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo.
  • On Wednesday, Russia withdrew a request for a flotilla of warships, including its flagship aircraft carrier the Admiral Kuznetsov, to refuel in the Spanish port of Ceuta as the ships head toward Syria.
  • The UK has deployed hundreds of troops to Eastern Europe as NATO continues to bolster its presence in the face of perceived Russian provocation.
  • "Russia has tripled defense spending," Stoltenberg told reporters.
  • NATO defense ministers met Wednesday in Brussels, Belgium, to discuss the situation as well as the fight against ISIS.
  • Poland's paramilitary defense has grown rapidly, with more than 35,000 people signing up and undergoing military training. They range from high school students to lawyers and doctors.
  • n July, the UK said it would deliver one of four battalions to NATO's enhanced forward presence in the Baltic states and Poland.
  • Belgium, Croatia, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Norway will join a German-led battalion in Lithuania, while Denmark and France will contribute to the UK-led battalion in Estonia.
  • In February, the US Department of Defense announced it was spending $3.4 billion for the European Reassurance Initiative to deter Russian aggression against NATO allies.
  • A limited rotational force of 330 Marines are set to be located at the Vaernes military base in Norway, according to a statement from the Norwegian Defense Ministry.
drewmangan1

EU Sets Belgium an Ultimatum on CETA - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...n-ultimatum-on-ceta-1477238529

politics economic ultimatum

shared by drewmangan1 on 26 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • A separate draft declaration, prepared by the commission for the Belgian government, says that CETA “constitutes a radical reform in investment litigation resolution,” because it will lead to the establishment of an arbitration tribunal and appeals court with judges from the EU and from Canada.
aqconces

Nurse Edith Cavell and the British World War One propaganda campaign - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...uk-england-norfolk-34401643

british war propaganda

shared by aqconces on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Edith Cavell worked as a nurse at the Berkendael Institute in Brussels from 1907, where she helped pioneer modern nursing techniques in Belgium.
  • She was arrested for treason in August 1915 for helping more than 200 Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium
  • In the immediate aftermath of her death, the nurse was used heavily in the British propaganda drive - a campaign that sometimes obscured the real Edith Cavell.
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  • "World War One was the first time propaganda was used as a weapon of war.
  • "It was used to galvanise public opinion against the Germans."
manhefnawi

Fourteen Points | United States declaration | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Fourteen-Points

World War 1 Covenant Peace Turks Russia France Italy Balkans

shared by manhefnawi on 16 May 18 - No Cached
  • essential nature of a post-World War I settlement
  • peace
  • freedom of navigation upon the seas
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  • establishment of an equality of trade conditions
  • national armaments will be reduced
  • adjustment of all colonial claims
  • the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight
  • The evacuation of all Russian territory
  • 7. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored
  • restore confidence among the nations
  • All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored
  • the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all
  • A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy
  • occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea
  • The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development
  • An independent Polish state should be erected
  • A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity
  • On Oct. 3–4, 1918, Prince Maximilian of Baden, the German imperial chancellor, sent a note, via Switzerland, to President Wilson, requesting an immediate armistice and the opening of peace negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points
  • Germans would later argue a “betrayal” when faced by the harsher terms of the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles
anonymous

Belgium shooting: Two policewomen, passerby killed - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Shooting terror crisis culture

shared by anonymous on 01 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Belgian media, including CNN affiliate RTBF, are naming the gunman as Benjamin Herman. A spokesperson for the Brussels prosecutor told CNN the attacker, who was shot dead by police, was 31 years old and had the initials B.H. but declined to provide the full name.
  • According to the prosecutor, the suspect then took refuge in a local high school, where he held a woman hostage. When police intervened, the man opened fire, injuring several other officers, before he was shot dead.
  • Liege is Belgium's third-largest city, after Brussels and Antwerp, according to the national tourist office. For centuries, it has been an important cultural and industrial center for the country.
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  • In 2011, Liege was the scene of a grenade and gun attack that left at least five dead and injured more than 100.
manhefnawi

George V: How To Keep Your Crown | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...george-v-how-keep-your-crown

1917 Nicholas II Wilhelm Prussia Russia Britain George V Monarchy

shared by manhefnawi on 03 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • In May 1910 seven kings (of Belgium, Greece, Norway, Spain, Bulgaria, Denmark and Portugal), one emperor (of Germany) and some 30 princes and archdukes gathered in London for the funeral of Edward VII
  • Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, also at the funeral, was murdered at Sarajevo in 1914; the new heir Karl abdicated in 1918
  • George’s favourite cousin Nicholas, Tsar of Russia, abdicated in 1917 and was murdered a year later. George’s other cousin Wilhelm II, German Kaiser, was forced from the throne into exile. By 1918 George wasn’t the only king left in Europe, but he was the only emperor
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  • The reason essentially was because he didn’t have any power.
  • Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas, both to differing degrees autocratic monarchs, had gone to strenuous lengths to ignore aspects of the political landscape they didn’t like or found offensively modern
  • Nicholas, meanwhile, did everything he could to avoid having to engage with the modern world in any shape or form, terrified that any change would threaten his control over Russia. He regarded autocracy as a sacred trust handed down to him that must be kept intact whatever.
  • As for the workers and peasants
  • Nicholas simply never encountered them
  • The king and his secretaries believed the British royal family must sell itself to the nation, justify its existence and seem entirely unthreatening.
  • Of the seven kings at Edward’s funeral, only three others kept their thrones: Belgium, Norway and Denmark. All three were constitutional monarchies.
carolinehayter

Switzerland to ban wearing of burqa and niqab in public places | Switzerland | The Guar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rqa-and-niqab-in-public-places

politics culture policy

shared by carolinehayter on 08 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Muslim groups criticise move, which they say will further stigmatise and marginalise their community
  • Switzerland will follow France, Belgium and Austria after narrowly voting in a referendum to ban women from wearing the burqa or niqab in public spaces.
  • Just over 51% of Swiss voters cast their ballots in favour of the initiative to ban people from covering their face completely on the street, in shops and restaurants.
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  • Switzerland’s parliament and the seven-member executive council that constitutes the country’s federal government opposed the referendum proposal. They argued that full facial veils represented a “fringe phenomenon”, and instead proposed an initiative that would force people to lift their facial coverings when asked to confirm their identity to officials.
  • Muslim groups have criticised the ban. “This is clearly an attack against the Muslim community in Switzerland. What is aimed here is to stigmatise and marginalise Muslims even more,”
  • “A burqa ban would damage our reputation as an open and tolerant tourism destination,” said Nicole Brändle Schlegel of the HotellerieSuisse umbrella organisation.
  • Supporters of the ban argue that it also intended to stop violent street protesters and football hooligans wearing masks, and that the referendum text does not explicitly mention Islam or the words “niqab” or “burqa”.Their campaign, however, framed the referendum as a verdict on the role of Islam in public life.
  • Campaign ads it paid for showed a woman wearing a niqab and sunglasses alongside the slogan: “Stop extremism! Yes to the veil ban.”
  • A video on the Swiss government’s website explaining the arguments in favour of a ban proposed that “religious veils like the burqa or the niqab are a symbol of the oppression of women and aren’t suitable to our society”.
  • A recent study by the University of Lucerne put the number of women in Switzerland who wear a niqab at 21 to 37, and found no evidence at all of women wearing the burqa, which women were forced to wear in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
  • Muslims make up around 5% of the Swiss population
  • The referendum outcome means Switzerland will follow France, which banned wearing a full face veil in public in 2011. Full or partial bans on wearing face coverings in public are also in place in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark and the Netherlands.
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