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Author: Vijeta Uniyal

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Vijeta Uniyal

Vijeta Uniyal is an Indian journalist based in Germany. He is Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

The leader of the Italian League party, Matteo Salvini, plans to form an electoral alliance with Poland's ruling conservatives in the run-up to the upcoming European Union elections. Salvini is spearheading a campaign to build an anti-establishment alliance ahead of the election. In October, he teamed up with Marine Le Pen's newly-formed French National Rally (NR) to launch the "Freedom Front" coalition. Salvini will meet the leader of Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party, Jarosław Kaczyński, on Wednesday to "strike a deal" ahead of the EU parliament elections scheduled for this May, the public broadcaster Radio Poland disclosed.

Austrian police have changed a young woman with inflicting bodily harm for defending herself against a sexual molester, local newspapers report. The incident took place during the New Year's Eve celebrations in Vienna's landmark City Hall square, where a 21-year-old Swiss woman pushed back an Afghan migrant who tried to assault her.

Berlin will be lobbying the United Nations to secure a permanent seat at the Security Council for the European Union, German state media said. "Over the next two years, Germany's main concern will be to try and ensure that the European Union as a whole is given a permanent seat," public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported Tuesday. This year, Germany takes up the non-permanent seat at the Council for a two year term.

The year began with an ominous warning from the German authorities. A team of researchers commissioned by the Ministry of Family Affairs found a "correlation between the refugee arrivals and violent crimes." Not that anyone needed a report to prove the obvious. The mainstream German media predictably trashed the findings and politicians in Berlin ignored them.

German prosecutors have charged a 27-year-old ISIS bride with the murder of a 5-year-old 'slave' girl. The German national, named in the media as Jennifer W., traveled to Syria in 2014, where she and her husband bought the little girl as a slave.

Germany wants to introduce a "mosque tax" for German Muslims to fund mosques and Islamic religious activities. The measure proposed by the lawmakers of Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition aims to win the loyalty of Muslim clerics who receive generous funding from Islamic countries such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.

Chinese authorities are cracking down on Christmas celebrations. Several Chinese cities have banned Christmas decorations, with government officials ordering the removal of Christmas trees, lights and bells from shopping malls and offices.

German weekly Der Spiegel has fired an award-winning journalist for faking news stories for years, the publication said Wednesday. "Claas Relotius, a reporter and editor, falsified his articles on a grand scale and even invented characters, deceiving both readers and his colleagues," Der Spiegel disclosed.

With British Prime Minister Theresa May failing to get parliamentary support for her plan to leave the European Union and only 100 days until the deadline, Britain is veering towards a "no deal" Brexit. In case of a no deal Brexit, the UK will leave the EU without any formal agreement on the future relationship with the 27-member European bloc. This would mean the UK would be "treated as a 'third country' by the EU with commerce governed by World Trade Organisation rules," British tabloid The Sun reported. Currently the UK's trade, customs, and immigration policies are subject to EU laws and regulatory bodies. Under the blueprint agreement presented by May's government and Brussels, the EU courts will continue to have jurisdiction over many aspects of British life.

An Iranian activist jailed for 'insulting Islam' on social media has died after a prolonged hunger strike, media reports say. Vahid Sayadi Nasiri, a 37-year-old Iranian blogger, was arrested in 2015 and received an eight year jail sentence for "insulting Islamic sanctities" and criticizing Iran's Shi'a Islamist regime, the U.S.-based watchdog Iran Human Rights Monitor said. He began his hunger strike in October protesting the inhumane prison conditions and frequent beatings by fellow inmates.

The German parliament approved a 'third gender' identity, allowing people to identify themselves as "diverse" on official documents instead of the usual male or female option. The new law introduced by Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition has been passed by both chambers of German Bundestag, with the upper house adopting it on Friday.

Turkey is preparing a military offensive against the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurds, Turkish state-run media sources say. "We will start our operation in a few days to liberate areas east of the Euphrates River from terrorist organizations," President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared in a speech in Ankara Wednesday, referring to the presence of Kurdish forces in neighboring Syria. Kurds, fighting alongside the Assyrian Christians, had played a key role in liberating large parts of Syrian and Iraqi territories from the Islamic State.

Representatives from around 150 countries signed the United Nations migration pact in Morocco on Monday. The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, as the agreement is formally known, aims to create a legal framework to handle growing migration from impoverished third world countries to the Western world -- overriding the immigration policies of the individual nation states. German Chancellor Merkel, whose open border policies drew millions of asylum seekers from North Africa and the Middle East into Europe in recent years, hailed the signing of the pact as an "important day." It was is about "nothing less than the foundation of our international cooperation," she added. The German leader "received a standing ovation on Monday after an impassioned speech," the UK newspaper The Guardian reported.

The number of weapon permits in Germany is soaring to record heights since Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the country's borders to migrants in the spring of 2015. German authorities issued 600,000 basic weapon licenses since 2014, an increase of 130 percent, figures published by the German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle show. The surge in weapon ownership reflects the waning public confidence in the German government's ability to protect ordinary citizens.

The European Union is in the midst of a political turmoil over the ratification of the United Nations pact on migration. The resistance to the pact is galvanizing in Europe ahead of the December 10 deadline when the representatives from some 180 UN member states will meet in Morocco, a Muslim-majority country in North Africa, to formally adopt the "Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration," as the pact is officially called.

Belgium became the latest EU country to get sucked into the crisis, with its ruling coalition teetering on the brink of collapse over the migration dispute. The country's right-wing New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) broke away from the ruling alliance amid sharp disagreements over the UN pact. The N-VA regards the agreement as an infringement of Belgian sovereignty. "In our democracy, we decide. The sovereignty is with the people," the party said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been working behind the scenes to prevent European Union member countries from recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the newspaper Jerusalem Post reported. The revelation was made by Tomas Sandell, the director of the European Coalition for Israel in Brussels. Chancellor Merkel made a series of calls to European leaders in April while "many of the nations were seriously considering moving their embassies." Sandell said. "This is not the Germany we once knew. This is not the even Angela Merkel we once knew when she was elected."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has successfully lobbied the United Nations to classify Climate Change as legitimate grounds for migration, a communique issued by the German parliament disclosed. "In order to shape migration in the context of Climate Change in sustainable manner, Germany advocated to recognize Climate Change as basis for migration in international negotiations for the global migration pact," a parliamentary bulletin surfaced on Monday said.  The document was made public on Twitter by Ralf Schuler, the parliamentary correspondent for the German newspaper Bild.

Amid rising antisemitism and anti-Israel activism in Europe, over 3000 members of Jewish diaspora and supporters of Israel gathered in Frankfurt, Germany, for the 5th German Israel Congress this weekend. Widely regarded as the biggest pro-Israel event in Europe, the conference was attended by leading politicians, government officials, and public figures from Germany and Israel. Israel's Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan took the opportunity to urge the German government to take a tougher stance on Iran. "Germany should take a more aggressive stance against the Iranian regime," Minister Erdan said. "It was only yesterday that President Rouhani called Israel metastatic cancer. History has taught us that anti-Semitic threats from fanatical leaders, and exporters of terror who have hegemonic aspirations, must be taken seriously."