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Serbian government backs off curfew, adopts other virus measures after protests

RFE/RL's Balkan Service
RFE/RL
Thu, 09 Jul 2020 21:07 UTC
protester faces police Belgrade Serbia

A protester remonstrates with police during violent demonstrations in Belgrade on July 8.
Serbia's COVID-19 crisis team has declared several new measures to control the spread of the coronavirus, but will not implement a curfew after a second night of clashes in Belgrade fueled by public anger over the government's response to the pandemic.

Prime Minister Ana Brnabic said on July 9 that there will be a ban on organized public gatherings of more than 10 people in the capital, both indoors and outdoors.

Despite the ban, protesters began gathering for a third night in front of the Serbian parliament in Belgrade. Most of them sat on the sidewalk outside the national assembly in order to differentiate themselves from those who may engage in violence.

Among the other measures announced by Brnabic are observing social-distancing rules when indoors and restrictions on indoor facilities that will ban people from working between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., while open spaces such as parks will be closed from 11 p.m. to 6 am.

Brnabic explained that the measures are only for the capital, where the situation is most critical and where police used tear gas to disperse a protest that lasted well after nightfall on July 8 outside parliament.

Comment: More coverage from RT:

Second night of clashes in Serbia as government & opposition blame each other for protests over Covid-19 lockdown
Demonstrators used garbage bins and planters to set up barricades and blocked streetcar and vehicle traffic in downtown Belgrade for several hours, local media reported. The government responded with riot police, armored vehicles of the Gendarmerie, and horse cavalry sent to push back and disperse the crowd.



Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic said 10 officers were injured on Wednesday, including one who broke both legs after being pushed down a flight of stairs. He added that police only used force when the protesters tried to "lynch" them, using fence posts, clubs, shovels, rocks, teargas canisters and even Molotov cocktails to attack the officers.

Meanwhile, videos shared by protesters on social media showed a group of riot police beating up a demonstrator curled up on the ground.


Some opposition leaders indeed tried to take over the protests on Tuesday; video showed former Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic getting booed and slapped upside the head when he tried to join the crowd outside the parliament.

On Wednesday, Democrats blamed "regime provocateurs" for that incident and organized a small protest themselves. However, when former President Boris Tadic attempted to join the main crowd, he was booed, insulted and chased off.

Local media showed photos of demonstrators carrying a cross and waving all manner of Serbian flags, including the one dedicated to Kosovo, a breakaway province run by NATO and ethnic Albanians since the 1999 war. Vucic is supposed to meet with French and German leaders later this week to arrange negotiations with the ethnic Albanian leadership, and many of the protesters accuse him of "treason" for allegedly planning to recognize their secession.

Some of the hand-made signs carried by protesters did feature the "Otpor fist" that became notorious in 2000, but also said "This is for you, dad" - quoting a young man who told reporters on Tuesday that his father had died of Covid-19 because there weren't enough ventilators.
Serbian defense minister says protests are 'coup attempt', aim to spark civil war
The brewing unrest is actually a coup attempt, Serbian Defense Minister Aleksandar Vulin opined on Thursday while speaking on local television. The "terrible street violence" has purely political backgrounds, he argued.
We have a coup attempt, we have an attempt to seize power by force and an attempt to provoke a civil war in Serbia. It cannot be described in any other way.
President Aleksandar Vucic announced on Tuesday that a curfew would be put in place this Friday and run throughout the weekend. Right after, thousands of people gathered outside the parliament.

They clashed with police while apparently trying to get into the building. Riot squads fired tear gas to force the crowds back.

According to Defense Minister Vulin, the protests were a coordinated action and "did not happen by accident." He noted that media coverage across the Balkans was generally hostile toward the Serbian government, which, again, "is not accidental."
It is obvious that there is an orchestrated [media] campaign because they do not want a successful and stable Serbia.
The Balkan nation has reported over 17,000 Covid-19 cases and over 340 fatalities. Mass protests, in which people didn't keep apart, have only increased the risk of spreading the contagion, Vulin warned.

"I wonder who will be responsible for the fact that hundreds and thousands of people became infected yesterday and the day before yesterday," he said.

Meanwhile, President Vucic backtracked on the curfew. The government is expected to try other measures, including shortened hours for public spaces and fines for those not wearing protective masks.
See also:

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Binoculars

'Pull up your pants & finish school': Would CNN's Don Lemon cancel himself over shockingly unwoke 2013 tips to black community?


RT
Thu, 09 Jul 2020 21:25 UTC
don lemon
© CNN
A vintage clip of CNN anchor Don Lemon telling black people to act civilized and disregard "street culture" has the woke pundit's detractors' jaws on the floor, wondering what happened to him over the intervening seven years.

In the 2013 clip, Lemon praises Fox News host Bill O'Reilly as the Republican pundit decries the "disintegration of the African-American family," even arguing O'Reilly "doesn't go far enough" when he denounces "street culture." The video was posted to social media by "Panda Tribune" on Wednesday and quickly circulated among conservatives, who had a hard time reconciling this Lemon with his painfully-PC modern-day counterpart.


Ordering black people to "pull up [their] pants," stop using "the n-word" and littering, "finish school," and wait until they're married to reproduce, the CNN personality of seven years ago comes off as borderline unrecognizable to those who know him as the ultra-woke face of the "Orange Man Bad" network.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired the segment on his show Wednesday night, marveling that if Lemon or one of his colleagues came out with those lines in 2020, "that would be their last live broadcast ever - they'd be fired immediately."
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2 + 2 = 4

Orwellian: Teacher blames 'Western imperialism,' 'colonization' for concept of 2+2=4

Paula Bolyard
PJ Media
Wed, 08 Jul 2020 21:30 UTC
1984 Room 101
Brittany Marshall, a self-described teacher and Ph.D. student, took to Twitter this past weekend to voice her displeasure about the concept of 2+2=4, saying the "idea" of the simple math equation is merely "cultural."

1984 called. It wants Room 101 back.
Brittany Marshall math
"Nope the idea of 2+2 equaling 4 is cultural and because of western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing," wrote Marshall (HT: Disrn). Never mind that the Arabic numeral system we use is not, you know, "Western."

Marshall goes by the pronouns "she/her" and describes herself on Twitter as a "teacher, scholar, social justice change agent, Chicagoan, PhD student, architecture enthusiast, wannabe math person, BLM always..."

Just the kind of person you want teaching your kids, right?
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NPC

Princeton University faculty seek to establish racial thought police & punish insufficiently diverse disciplines


RT
Thu, 09 Jul 2020 20:59 UTC
Princeton University
© Princeton University
Professors at prestigious Princeton University have assailed the school for its alleged "anti-Black racism," issuing a lengthy list of demands including bribing departments to hire minorities (and punishing those that don't).

Over 350 Princeton faculty members have signed on to an open letter demanding the university prioritize the fight against "anti-Black racism," which the writers insist "has a visible bearing upon Princeton's campus makeup and its hiring practices." Members of every department of the Ivy League school except Chemical and Biological Engineering and Operations Research and Financial Engineering have added their names to the July 4 manifesto, giving its 48 demands significant heft.

For an "anti-racist" missive, however, some of the demands seem curiously...racist. Nonwhite faculty are to receive extra sabbaticals, extra pay and extra awards to compensate for the "invisible work" they do, the letter states, explaining how minority professors are called upon to "chiefly and constantly 'serve' and 'represent' [racial diversity] in the interest of administrative goals" even as its authors enumerate ever more diversity-focused administrative goals.

Lamenting that just 7 percent of tenure-track faculty are non-white, the writers suggest giving those oppressed few "a full year of course relief" to seek out and recruit more faculty of color.

More ominously, an "outside committee of academics, law professors, artists, and cultural advisors from communities of color" are to be brought in to make decisions about "race, racism, anti-racism, and racial equity" that will impact the entire campus, while an "internal committee of faculty and students of color" must be appointed to hold the university accountable for carrying out these outsiders' demands.
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Handcuffs

Governor of Russia's Khabarovsk region ARRESTED by FSB in crime gang & assassinations probe

Jonny Tickle
RT
Thu, 09 Jul 2020 21:05 UTC
Sergey Furgal
© Russia’s Investigative Committee
Federal Security Service agents have arrested Sergey Furgal, the governor of Russia's Khabarovsk Region, on suspicion of organizing the murders of multiple businessmen over a decade ago.

The politician is accused of running a criminal gang and ordering the assassination of "a number of entrepreneurs" between 2004 and 2005. Russia's Investigative Committee shared a video of Furgal's arrest in a Thursday morning raid, but few details about the investigation.

According to a source from TASS news agency, the case includes "at least two episodes of murder and one attempted murder" - the murders of Yevgeny Zori in 2004 and Oleg Bulatov in 2005, and the attempted assassination of businessman Alexander Smolsky.

Besides Governor Furgal, the authorities previously arrested four other alleged members of the same organized crime group, based in Russia's Far East.

Comment: If only Western leaders had the guts to order the arrest of corrupted and criminal politicians. Maybe there would be an increase in trust in the political system.

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NPC

Cities are sexist because skyscrapers look like penises, says Guardian in unironic rehash of 1980s comedy

Guy Birchall
RT
Wed, 08 Jul 2020 20:56 UTC
skyscraper
© AFP / GIUSEPPE CACACE
A recent article in the newspaper described skyscrapers as "upward-thrusting buildings ejaculating into the sky." No wonder the woke left wants to cancel comedy when it is literally publishing punchlines instead of headlines.

It's taken almost 40 years, but the Guardian is now unironically publishing jokes as news. To shake up its pages a bit, it took a break from calling everything racist to point out that cities are full of penises.

Obviously, it would not be a revolutionary observation by someone working in the paper's London office that they were surrounded by dicks. But that is not what this article was about. This piece was about the phallic nature of skyscrapers.

The article, in the architecture section, was headlined: 'Upward-thrusting buildings ejaculating into the sky - do cities have to be so sexist?' I had to double check this was not a parody when I first came across it on social media, because it is literally the punchline to a sketch on one of my favourite comedy shows.
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Sherlock

Media outlets continue to be duped by a Middle East propaganda campaign

Adam Rawnsley
Daily Beast
Tue, 07 Jul 2020 20:01 UTC
fake news
© The Daily Beast/Getty
If you want a hot take about the Middle East, Raphael Badani is your man.

As a Newsmax "Insider" columnist, he has thoughts about how Iraq needs to rid itself of Iranian influence to attract investment and why Dubai is an oasis of stability in a turbulent region. His career as a "geopolitical risk consultant and interactive simulation designer" and an "international relations senior analyst" for the Department of Labor have given him plenty of insights about the Middle East. He's printed those insights at a range of conservative outlets like the Washington Examiner, RealClear Markets, American Thinker, and The National Interest.

Unfortunately for the outlets who published his articles and the readers who believed them, Raphael Badani does not exist.

His profile photos are stolen from the blog of an unwitting San Diego startup founder. His LinkedIn profile, which described him as a graduate of George Washington and Georgetown, is equally fictitious (and was deleted following publication of this article).
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Che Guevara

No, they're not stupid: Why Leftists destroyed a statue of an elk in Portland

Robert Spencer
PJ Media
Fri, 03 Jul 2020 20:38 UTC
portland riot
© Julio Rosas/Townhall
Thursday night in Portland, Antifa and BLM rioters set fire to a 120-year-old statue of an elk, causing it such extensive damage that it had to be removed. They've accordingly come in for some mockery on social media, as people wonder how the elk expressed his "racism" and "white supremacism." Many take the destruction of the elk statue as a manifestation of the same stupidity that led rioters who proclaimed they were out to destroy monuments to slave-holders to target statues of General Grant and Abraham Lincoln. But the rioters aren't stupid, even as they destroyed the elk. Once one understands what their real goal is, all their actions make sense.

In the first place, the rioters aren't really out to bring about a societal repudiation of "racism" or "white supremacy" at all. That's just a pretext. If they were, they wouldn't have gone after Grant and Lincoln, and they didn't go after them because they were too miseducated and propagandized to know better. What the rioters want to do is the very definition of terrorism: to strike fear into the hearts of a population so that its entire existence is consumed by it, and it becomes paralyzed, unable to act even in its own defense.

Antifa and Black Lives Matter are terrorists not just because they are open Marxists who want to destroy the United States as a free republic and establish an authoritarian socialist state in its place; they're also terrorists because terror is one of their principal tactics. They want to make you afraid. They want to make you think the ground is unsteady beneath your feet, that the old order is crumbling, and that they represent the new, energized vanguard, or what another terrorist, Osama bin Laden, called "the strong horse." They also want to make you think that at any moment, you yourself could be targeted and destroyed, even if you're as innocent of wrongthink and unacceptable political opinions as the Portland elk.

Comment: He's not wrong. Some do know what they're doing: the individuals who play an 'inspirational' role for the movements, and the puppet masters pulling their strings. Many others go along because they've drunk the koolaid and actually believe the propaganda. As Spencer points out, all revolutionary movements follow the same script, as described in detail by Andrew Lobaczewski in his book, Political Ponerology.

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Bullseye

Why wearing face masks shouldn't be made compulsory in the UK

Neil Clark
Sputnik
Thu, 09 Jul 2020 08:54 UTC
doctor mask
© CC0
The UK government is coming under intense pressure to make the wearing of face masks mandatory in shops and other enclosed public places in England, but if that happens, it would be the wrong move.

And so it goes on. Even though deaths with COVID have dropped sharply, even though the virus has clearly petered out in Britain, even though there's been an official acknowledgement that some 30,000 'positive' test results have been double-counted, the clamour for more 'New Abnormal' measures to be introduced grows by the day.

The 'big' thing this week is to try and make the wearing of face masks compulsory.

Comment: See also:

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Car Black

BLM comes for Detroit industry: Some Ford employees call for end of cop car manufacturing

Aaron Foley
Jalopnik
Wed, 08 Jul 2020 19:16 UTC
police car graphic fracture
© Jim Cooke/Getty Images
Some American corporations have been forced to come to Jesus in the past few weeks with acknowledgements of racial insensitivity, failures in workplace diversity, and other contributions to institutional racism — but for the most part this reckoning has largely bypassed the automotive industry. Or so we thought, before hearing that Ford Motor Company has a situation brewing that could lead to a re-examination of the automaker's role in law enforcement.

According to a tip in the Jalopnik inbox, a number of Black Ford employees came together to raise concern about their employer's manufacture of police vehicles. (We have since received clarification that the letter was written composed by a group of Black and white Ford employees.) Ford wouldn't be the first company to come under scrutiny for making equipment for law enforcement, as folks around the country are raising flags about who gets contracts to produce what for use by police. From small players like bike companies — such as Trek, who makes police bikes — to behemoths like Amazon and its facial-recognition technology a number of companies are facing pressure now, and Ford certainly isn't the first company with internal revolt.
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Amazon Smile
Revolt! T-shirts