Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday that strategic nuclear weapons can be used to defend “the Donbass republics and other territories accepted into Russia” and warned the “retired idiots with general’s stripes” at NATO that hypersonic missiles can “reach targets in Europe and in the United States.”

Germany’s fresh and frozen food sectors are in the middle of their “worst crisis since the end of the Second World War” and could face a wave of bankruptcies and production restrictions, leading to gaps on store shelves, manufacturers associations have warned in an open letter to the German government.

The traditional Central European industrial powerhouse has been hit hard by the largely self-inflicted energy crisis stemming from Brussels’ decision to phase out Russian oil and gas to “punish” Moscow for its military operation in Ukraine. President Putin has warned that Europe is “in no position to dictate” its “will” to Russia on energy matters.

“There is a significant risk of gaps in the daily food supply for people in Germany. The situation is more than serious,” the letter, addressed to Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Economy Minister Robert Habeck and Federal Minister for Food and Agriculture Cem Ozdemir and published by Welt, warned.

The appeal was penned by the German Frozen Food Institute, the Association of German Cold Stores and Cold Logistics Companies, with five other industry groups including the Meat Industry Association, the Federal Fish Association and the German Fruit Trade Association.

In a 180-page white supremacist manifesto posted online before the racist May 14 mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, domestic terrorist Payton Gendron wrote that he wanted “to spread awareness to my fellow whites about the real problems the West is facing.”

In addition to the Buffalo shooting, where the white supremacist terrorist slaughtered 10 innocent Black people and wounded three others, this white supremacist theory has inspired attacks on ethnic and religious minorities as far away as Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas.

There, near “Gothic windows and Gothic fountains,” were Muslim women in veils and men in djellaba robes, he recalled. “I was, of course, accustomed like everybody else to seeing the change of people in [the predominantly Arab and Black] suburbs, but there it was especially striking.”

http://globalreportage.org/2022/05/30/what-is-this-white-supremacist-great-replacement-theory-every-fox-news-host-is-ranting-about/

The EU claims that it’s open to all refugees — but those from Ukraine get a much warmer reception than others

As a result of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, large numbers of people have been fleeing their homeland, en masse, for the past three months. Most have been seeking asylum in countries that are part of the European Union, which Kiev so desperately wants to join. According to UN estimates, six million had left by the middle of May.

The bulk of that burden has fallen on countries directly bordering Ukraine. Poland has received the most, more than 3.5 million people, breaking Germany’s record from two years ago, when, it became the first country in Europe to accept more than a million refugees (1.2 million), In that case, overwhelmingly from the Middle East during fighting in Syria.

Moreover, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia are part of the Schengen area, where there is no internal border controls. This means it is impossible to accurately determine whether the refugees have settled in the country they first entered or moved on.

Ukrainians fleeing the conflict automatically receive temporary protection status after crossing the border. They can immediately go to the EU country where it will be most convenient for them to find a place to live. For example, where their relatives or acquaintances reside.

At the same time, officially, refugees do not need documents to cross the border. Providing an identity card or passport, birth certificates for children, and medical documents is not a requirement, but a recommendation.

While crossing the border, Ukrainian residents have the right to apply for asylum, but the granting of official refugee status can take months.

Meanwhile what kind of assistance are those countries offering the refugees? In nations bordering Ukraine, they can stay in reception centers if they cannot live with friends or relatives. The EU has given Ukrainians the right to stay and work in 27 member states for up to two years. They will also receive social benefits, access to housing, medical care, and schools for their children.

Polish authorities have had to allocate about $1.8 billion to an emergency assistance fund to provide financial support for the refugees that have arrived. They already make up 8% of the country’s population, and the 300,000 Ukrainians who settled in Warsaw have increased the Polish capital’s population by 15%. Of course, all this has put an additional burden on transport, housing, and everyday life in the city, but authorities promise they will cope with the load.

The EU has become noticeably ‘kinder’ with respect to the suffering of refugees over the past two months. This would appear to be a significant step up, considering that nothing like this was offered to migrants from the Middle East. Refugees from countries like Sudan can only dream of receiving such hospitality.

 http://globalreportage.org/2022/06/05/eu-selective-treatment-of-refugees-can-be-seen-in-the-warm-welcome-for-ukrainians-compared-to-those-from-other-places/

While 90% of black voters backed Democratic candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, just 70% approve of his job performance two years in, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll published on Saturday.

Less than a quarter of respondents “strongly approve” of the president’s performance, an ominous note ahead of what is shaping up to be a difficult mid-term election for the Democratic Party, and 28% disapprove (either “strongly” or “somewhat”) with Biden’s work in office.

Additionally, just 60% of black voters say Biden is keeping most of his major campaign promises, while 37% say he is not. From the sky-high cost of living – climbing ever higher due to record inflation – to voting rights and policing reform, Biden’s perceived failure to deliver on the issues his supporters care about have given many of them second thoughts about whether they’ll even go to the polls at all come November.

Just a fifth of respondents thought Biden had budged the needle on criminal justice reform, whereas the leading response (42%) was that he had just done “a little,” while a third claimed he had done “nothing” on the issue. Biden faced significant opposition during the presidential primaries due to his central role in passing the 1994 crime bill, which included the controversial ‘three strikes’ provision that significantly increased the number of black Americans in prison, many of whom were often handed draconian sentences for relatively minor offenses.

The president has repeatedly defended his work on those laws, but his efforts to present himself as a crusader for criminal justice reform by pardoning three people and commuting the sentences of 75 nonviolent drug offenders, compared to the thousands incarcerated under ‘three strikes’ laws while he was a senator, have done little to change his image.

Black voters are less convinced after two years in office that Biden is sympathetic to their problems, with an 8-point drop from 74% in 2020 to 66% this year. However, three-quarters remain convinced that the Republican Party is racist against African-Americans, while just a quarter think the same about Democrats.

This uninspiring performance may have detrimental results at the polls, with fewer than two thirds of respondents (64%) saying they were “absolutely certain to vote” in the midterms when asked last month, compared to the 85% who said in June 2020 that they’d certainly vote in that year’s election.

Not everyone has blamed Biden for his poor performance, however. Poll respondents came up with numerous excuses for Democrats’ failure to deliver despite controlling both houses of Congress in addition to the presidency. “The Democratic Party doesn’t attack like a fist, they attack like five fingers. They go in different directions,” one survey respondent answered, while another suggested that the president could hardly be expected to accomplish much following on the heels of “someone as extreme as Trump” and claimed that the Democrat-controlled Congress was actually working against Biden.

 http://globalreportage.org/2022/06/05/poll-shows-african-american-voters-ditching-democratic-party-in-droves/

A Uvalde mother says she was handcuffed while urging law enforcement officials to enter Robb Elementary School during Tuesday’s shooting, according to the Wall Street Journal. Angeli Rose Gomez, who has a second- and third-grader at the school, says that she was one of several parents begging police to breach the building. After a few minutes of increasingly urgent goading, Gomez alleges that federal marshals handcuffed her because she was intervening in an active investigation. Gomez said she tried to convince Uvalde police officers that she knew to convince the marshals to take the cuffs off, all while the scene around her grew increasingly hectic. She claims she even saw one desperate father get pepper-sprayed.

When her cuffs were finally removed, Gomez claims that she jumped the school fence and dashed inside to get her children.

In the above he footage, desperate parents, some of whom can be heard screaming in pain and agony while begging local law enforcement officials, to enter Robb Elementary School, where teachers and their kids were being slaughtered by 18-year-old domestic terrorist Salvador Ramos.

Local Uvalde police officers spent nearly an hour outside of the school restraining the parents to keep them from going inside until off duty Border Patrol agents eventually breached the classroom door and shot the gunman dead.http://globalreportage.org/2022/05/30/uvalde-mom-handcuffed-for-begging-cops-to-storm-school-later-stormed-into-school-and-rescued-her-child/

Local officers reportedly delayed US Border Patrol agents from going after gunman who killed 21 people at Texas school

Not only were local police slow to confront the shooter who killed 19 children and two adults in Tuesday’s Texas school massacre, they also reportedly refused to allow federal agents to confront the gunman until nearly an hour after they’d arrived on the scene.

Specially equipped US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents, who arrived at the Uvalde, Texas elementary school between noon and 12:10pm, weren’t allowed by local police to breach the adjoining classrooms in which the shooter had locked himself until just before 1pm, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing unidentified federal officials.

The federal agents found a chaotic scene when they arrived at the school, where people were pulling children out of windows and police tried to secure a perimeter. The agents, who arrived at the school “far earlier than previously known,” didn’t understand why they weren’t allowed to immediately charge the gunman, the Times said.

“We were told to wait,” a Border Patrol official told Yahoo News on Friday. “We were told to wait and wait, and the team wanted to go. But you have to understand, CBP is not the lead agency, so they had to wait, and now look what happened.”

Uvalde is located west of San Antonio, about 80 miles from the US-Mexico border. Tuesday’s incident began when a 911 caller reported seeing a man with a gun outside Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School. The shooter, identified as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, reportedly entered the school through an unlocked door around 11:40am.

Rather than confronting the gunman immediately, as policing protocol requires in the case of an active shooter, 19 officers stood in the hallway outside the fourth-grade classrooms in which Ramos had locked himself, Texas director of public safety Steven McCraw told reporters on Friday. As more than 45 minutes ticked by, students inside the classroom desperately called 911 for help, in at least one case using a dead teacher’s phone.

“We were told to wait,” a Border Patrol official told Yahoo News on Friday. “We were told to wait and wait, and the team wanted to go. But you have to understand, CBP is not the lead agency, so they had to wait, and now look what happened.”

http://globalreportage.org/2022/05/30/uvalde-police-tried-to-stop-border-patrol-agents-from-charging-school-shooter/