Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, recently stated, “the EU should establish its own army to show Russia it is serious about defending European values.” During an interview with Die Welt am Sonntag, Juncker said, “Europe has lost a huge amount of respect. In foreign policy too, we don’t seem to be taken entirely seriously.
“The immigrant population of London has more than doubled since 1971 and is on course to account for over half of the capital’s residents within 16 years, analysis by The Times has revealed” (The Times, January 26, 2015). A spokesperson for Migration Watch noted that “On current trends, the UK-born will be in a minority in their own capital within 20 years, despite strong public opposition to mass immigration” (ibid.).
In response to Russia’s stepped-up air-defense training flights and the reopening of Russian military bases closed since the Cold War, “Norway’s defence minister has said her country’s armed forces will be restructured so they can respond faster to what she called increased Russian aggression” (The Guardian, February 25, 2015).
Has it been 50 years since that fateful day in the spring of 1965 in Selma, Alabama, when racial tensions boiled over as the Civil Rights movement focused on the hardened segregation culture of the “Old South?” As the decades have passed, much progress has been made in racial relations in the South and throughout the country. The brutality of the opposition back then, and the bravery, naïveté and willingness by the marchers, who were seeking the right to vote, to confront centuries of prejudice is still shocking today.