| Salving their conscience with the balm of delusional suicide. |
Meanwhile,
...back at the abandoned silver mine, the water was up to Jack's neck and still rising. And then he smelled the smoke...
the plight and desperation of refugees fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Eritrea
...is run by the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), with about the amounts of democracy and justice you'd expect from a party with that name. National elections have been periodically scheduled and cancelled; none have ever been held in the country. The president, Isaias Afewerki, has been in office since independence in 1993 and will probably die there of old age...
to arrive in the European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
by the thousands every day was highlighted again Tuesday, as hundreds of migrants on the Hungary-Serbia border fled from a holding area and broke though a police line on the frontier, some carrying children.
In Germany, the vice chancellor told public television ZDF that the country can deal "with something in the order of half a million for few years."
But he called on other European countries to take their allotted share of refugees and do more to ease the crisis, soon after Berlin said it will allocate nearly $7 billion to help accommodate and help refugees.
On Tuesday, thousands of refugees waited in Greece and Hungary -- which have seen the largest influx over the past several days -- for a chance to start new lives in prosperous European countries.
Both Germany and Sweden have called for a distribution of refugee among the 28 European Union countries, while Austria says that member states not taking in refugees should suffer financial penalties. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have resisted taking in more refugees.
The influx is the largest since World War One. Germany is expecting 800,000 refugees by the end of this year.
In Geneva, the United Nations
...where theory meets practice and practice loses...
harshly criticized the United States and wealthy Arab Gulf states for not taking in refugees.
Peter Sutherland, UN Secretary-General
the ephemeral Ban Ki-moon´s special representative on migration, said on Tuesday that it is not enough for Washington and wealthy Gulf Arab states to give money to help Syrian refugees."Taking refugees is separate from giving money," Sutherland was quoted as saying.
Most of the four million Syrian refugees from the war are in camps in Leb, Jordan,
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
and northern Iraq.
The plight of the refugees was brought home for many across the world last week, as the picture of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old boy who drowned as his family was trying to reach a Greek island, went viral on the Internet.