Please note that the poems and essays on this site are copyright and may not be reproduced without the author's permission.


Sunday 30 August 2015

Day Into Night


A Syrian couple waits for the train in Gevgelija with other refugees and migrants to continue their way to Europe: image via Aris Messinis @arismessinis, 29 August 2015

Hungarian policemen detain a Syrian migrant family after they entered Hungary at the border with Serbia, near Roszke, August 28, 2015.

Refugee arrested after risking Hungarian wire fence border barrier is surrounded by his despairing family: photo by Bernadett Szabo/Reuters, 28 August 2015


#Refugee family's despair as father is arrested after braving wire fence #Hungary border photo @afpattila @AFPphoto: image via Sunday Times Pictures @STPictures, 28 August 2015
 

#Refugee family's despair as father is arrested after braving wire fence #Hungary border photo @afpattila @AFPphoto: image via Sunday Times Pictures @STPictures, 28 August 2015

Hungary says anti-migrant barrier along Serb border complete
: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 28 August 2015

Hongrie: 2.700 réfugiés ont passé la frontière serbo-hongroise hier #AFP: image via AFP Photo Department @AFPphoto, 29 August 2015


#migrantcrisis - Syrian refugees and migrants after crossing Greece continue through FYR of Macedonia their way to Europe.: image via AFP Photo Department @AFPphoto, 29 August 2015 


#migrantcrisis - Syrian refugees and migrants after crossing Greece continue through FYR of Macedonia their way to Europe.: image via AFP Photo Department @AFPphoto, 29 August 2015 


#migrantcrisis - Syrian refugees and migrants after crossing Greece continue through FYR of Macedonia their way to Europe.: image via AFP Photo Department @AFPphoto, 29 August 2015 

A young Syrian boy stands inside a train heading from FYR of Macedonia to the border with Serbia: image via Aris Messinis @arismessinis, 29 August 2015

A Syrian boy cries after a missile fired by Syrian government forces hit a residential area of #Aleppo: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 22 July 2015

Embedded image permalink

Refugee wave into hotspot Hungary hits new record high - photo by @iandrej
: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 28 August 2015


Embedded image permalink

71 migrants perish in Austria truck tragedy
: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 28 August 2015


Four arrested over discovery of 71 bodies in abandoned truck, another grim migrant tragedy: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 28 August 2015

The #migrant crisis death toll rises – and the EU again fails to lead, writes @kwatkinsodi: image via ODI @ODI, 28 August 2015

Migrants: un enfant dans un train entre la #Grece et la #Macedoine en partance pour la Serbie #AFP @RAtanasovski: image via Isabelle Tourné @isatourne, 28 August 2015
 

Migrants on their way to cross the border from Greece to F.Y.R of Macedonia: image via Aris Messinis @arismessinis, 29 August 2015


Migrants on their way to cross the border from Greece to F.Y.R of Macedonia: image via Aris Messinis @arismessinis, 29 August 2015


Migrants on their way to cross the border from Greece to F.Y.R of Macedonia: image via Aris Messinis @arismessinis, 29 August 2015

#migrantcrisis - Migrants walk through a field to cross the border from Greece to Macedonia. By @ArisMessinis #AFP: image via AFP Photo Department @AFPphoto, 29 August 2015 

#migrantcrisis  - Migrants walk after crossing border from Greece to Macedonia near Gevgelija. By @ArisMessinis #AFP
: image via Christophe Delattre @chrisdelattre7, 30 August 2015


Governing a state like a business (I): The Honest Chicken Solution

Now the Czechs Have an Oligarch Problem, Too

Czech Finance Minister and oligarch Andrej Babis: photo by Michal Cizek via Foreign Policy/Democracy Lab, 10 April 2015

Now the Czechs Have an Oligarch Problem Too: How the rise of a powerful businessman threatens to undermine democratic institutions in the heart of Europe: Ola Cichowlas and Andrew Foxall, Democracy Lab/Foreign Policy, 10 April 2015

Czech oligarch Andrej Babis, his country’s second-richest man and one of the most politically influential billionaires in the world, is expanding his business empire into Prague’s corridors of power.

Babis currently serves as finance minister, but his ambitions are far grander. The rise of Babis -- nicknamed "Babisconi," after Italian billionaire turned prime minister Silvio Berlusconi -- marks a turning point in his country’s post-communist history.

Since its “Velvet Divorce” with Slovakia in 1993, the Czech Republic has made a rapid transition to democracy and market economics, enjoying some of Europe’s highest growth rates and becoming an active member of the EU. Like its Central European neighbors, the new country flourished and became, initially, a remarkable success story. But in recent years, its liberal democracy has weakened.

Since the global financial crisis, many Czechs have become increasingly disillusioned with Brussels. The Czech media landscape, once admirably diverse, is now increasingly controlled by powerful tycoons. President Milos Zeman has encouraged this process and, under his leadership, anti-establishment forces have flourished. Though the situation in Prague is not quite as dire as in Budapest, where Viktor Orban appears to be losing faith in democracy as a system, the rollback of democratic institutions in the Czech Republic is ringing alarm bells in a corner of Europe vulnerable to the influence of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The rise of Andrej Babis is a case in point.


Police suspect Bulgarian-Hungarian trafficking ring behind deaths of migrants found in truck
: image via Reuters Top News @Reuters, 28 August 2015

Four years ago Babis founded the Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO) party. After a series of scandals in which politicians enriched themselves in office, Babis’s party aimed, ironically enough, to capitalize on Czechs’ rising distaste for wealthy businessmen. ANO rose to power with the help of anti-corruption and anti-establishment slogans, at times even calling the Czech Republic a "failed state." It finished second in the country’s 2013 parliamentary elections and went on to join the coalition government. A year later, in the 2014 European Parliament elections, ANO went one better: It won more votes than any other Czech party.



Woman with smartphone (Milan): photo by Luca Napoli, 2 June 2013


As elsewhere in Europe, ANO’s brand of anti-politics resonates with the public. Portraying himself as a non-politician and outsider, Babis promises to dramatically change Czech governance. ANO’s voters are also attracted by his personal appeal: A blunt-speaking entrepreneur, his face beams out at Czechs from billboards and newspaper pages. But Babis and his fortune -- $2.4 billion, according to Forbes -- are mired in controversy.

Historians from Slovakia’s National Memory Institute, which preserves files dating from the country’s period under Nazi and communist rule, published documents suggesting not only that Babis collaborated with Czechoslovakia’s secret police, the StB (under the codename Bures), but that he may have even worked for the Soviet KGB as well. In 2014, Babis successfully sue the National Memory Institute in a Bratislava court, claiming that he had been wrongly registered as an agent in StB files. But the institute is appealing, maintaining that the court ruled unfairly and that former StB officers had lied under oath to protect him. Under the 1991 Czech lustration law, it is illegal for former StB collaborators and top communist functionaries to hold high political and economic posts. Yet when Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka (a member of the Czech Social Democratic Party, the country’s largest party) appointed Babis finance minister in 2014 without requesting a lustration certificate as he was supposed to, a Prague court merely announced its intention to fine him -- and the fine was annulled on Sobotka’s appeal.

Babis denies reports that his family, too, cooperated with the StB, arguing that they -- like many families -- were victims of the communist regime. But the archives suggest otherwise. Documents say that Babis’s diplomat father, Stefan (who allegedly ran a Vienna-based black-market arms trade business under the protection of the StB), and his brother, Alexander, voluntarily cooperated with the agency. When contacted for comment, Babis’s office said that he had cleared his name, while Babis himself has called all such allegations about his past “bullshit.”



Andrej Babiš – Czech oligarch
: image via Politico/European Voice, 11 September 2014


Babis’s business success -- which translated into a monthly salary of $1.4 million before he entered government -- is often attributed to the contacts he made during the late communist period. During the Velvet Revolution of November 1989, Babis was based in Morocco as a representative for Petrimex, Czechoslovakia’s state-controlled trade company. He returned home to see his country split in two. In 1993, Babis, helped by his former director at Petrimex, founded the fertilizer giant Agrofert, currently the Czech Republic’s fourth-largest company and a near-monopoly in several sectors of the economy.

Along the way, Agrofert acquired state-owned companies using state-backed loans on which Babis ultimately defaulted. (The Czech anti-corruption police eavesdroppped on Babis on the suspicion that he had participated in fraud at one of the companies.) In 2006, after Babis’s main business rival, Frantisek Mrazek, was found dead under mysterious circumstances, some suggested that Babis was to blame. Mrazek, it was alleged, had compromising material on Babis that he was planning to make public. No charges, however, were brought against Babis.

Babis’s businesses continue to benefit from his connections with the Czech political elite, in particular with President Milos Zeman. As prime minister in 2001, Zeman oversaw the sale of Unipetrol, a state-owned chemical company, to Babis. The deal was evidence of a strategic partnership between the two men that continues to this day. Although Babis pulled out of the sale a year later, he oversaw the sale of Unipetrol to a Polish company in 2005. Afterwards, high-ranking Polish officials reported that 42 million euros ($53 million) had been handed out in bribes on both sides of the border. In Warsaw, the scandal shook the Polish political scene. In Prague, however, the Czech Parliament failed to open an investigation, allegedly because of Babis’s close  with then Prime Minister Stanislav Gross. (In an email exchange with the authors, Babis’s office insisted that “no bribes” had been paid.)

Alarmingly, Babis’s approach to governing the country was, until recently, based on the notion that he would “govern the state like a business.”


A refrigerated truck, in which bodies of 71 migrants have been found on the A 4 Austrian highway, is parked in a facility which used to be a veterinary station at the border in Nickelsdorf, Austria on August 28, 2015. Austrian police said Friday that three people were in custody in Hungary over the discovery of 71 dead migrants in an abandoned truck with Hungarian number plates. AFP PHOTO / VLADIMIR SIMICEK

Lorry found to contain the bodies of 71 dead refugees on an Austrian motorway, still bearing brand logo of the chicken meat processing firm Hyza, a subsidiary of Agrofert, the vast holding company owned by Czech Finance Minister and oligarch Andrej Babis. The Czech Republic will not take any extraordinary security measures in reaction to the uncovering of 71 dead refugees in a lorry in Austria, Interior Minister Milan Chovanec told journalists today. He said the system of tightened checks of immigrants, applied by Prague since mid-June and also focusing on lorries and coaches, is sufficient.: photo by Czech News Agency, 28 August 2015

As in neighboring Slovakia and nearby Hungary, the rich and powerful are consolidating their control over the Czech media. In Prague, Babis is leading the way in what has been dubbed the “oligarchization” of the media. When the global financial crisis struck, long-term international investors began pulling out. Babis, who already owned a number of influential newspapers, expanded his media holdings: he acquired MAFRA Media Group, which controls the best-selling Czech broadsheet newspaper Mlada fronta DNES, and bought Radio Impuls, which has the largest listenership in the Czech Republic. These outlets regularly feature sympathetic coverage of Babis -- and criticism of his opponents. Since becoming finance minister, Babis has recruited senior police officers, state security agents, and former communist informers to help him consolidate power. This alliance of security forces, business, and the media is currently constrained by independent judges -- though such checks seem increasingly fragile.

Babis’s multiple media outlets have launched investigations into alleged corruption involving Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka, whose position Babis craves. After years of genuine media independence, many Czechs are talking of a return to the 1970s, when journalists aligned themselves with the political order. Babis wants to control, not just change, Czech politics.

The rise of Andrej Babis represents a new era in Czech politics -- one that is more preoccupied with business interests than safeguarding democracy. Prague was once a focal point for change in Central Europe, home to the former Eastern Bloc’s strongest dissident traditions. But in 2015, the Czech capital is in a very different place than what was envisaged by those who stood on Wenceslas Square in November 1989.

Corrections, April 23, 2015: Agrofert is the Czech Republic’s fourth-largest company, not the largest, as the article earlier stated. The Czech police conducted wiretaps on Andrej Babis in conjunction with a fraud investigation; his company did not obtain information on rivals through eavesdropping, as originally claimed. And Mlada fronta Dnes is the Czech Republic’s best-selling broadsheet newspaper, not the best-selling newspaper overall.


Czech Finance Minister Andrej Babis is seen casting his vote in the European Parliament elections at an elementary school in this file photo taken in Prague May 23, 2014.  REUTERS/David W Cerny/Files

Czech Finance Minister Andrej Babis is seen casting his vote in the European Parliament elections at an elementary school in Prague
: photo by David W Cerny/Reuters, 23 May 2014

Governing a state like a business (II): The E-Commerce Solution to the Immigration Problem


Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said the regional climate initiative “does nothing more than tax electricity, tax our citizens, tax our businesses, with no discernible or measurable impact upon our environment.”: photo by Mel Evans/Associated Press, 26 May 2011

Chris Christie: I would track immigrants like FedEx packages: Republican presidential contender revives lagging campaign by telling New Hampshire crowd he would ask FedEx to devise an immigrant tracking system: Reuters  29 August 2015

New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, said on Saturday he would combat illegal immigration by tracking foreign visitors like FedEx packages.

Christie, who is well back in the pack seeking the Republican nomination for president, told a campaign event in the early-voting state of New Hampshire that, if elected president, he would ask FedEx’s chief executive officer, Fred Smith, to devise the tracking system.

Immigration has become a top issue in the Republican campaign, with front-runner Donald Trump vowing to deport all the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants and to build a wall along the southern border.

“At any moment, FedEx can tell you where that package is. It’s on the truck. It’s at the station. It’s on the airplane,” Christie told the crowd in Laconia, New Hampshire. “Yet we let people come to this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them,” he said.

FEDEX E-COMMERCE SOLUTIONCOMPONENTS OF THE E-COMMERCE SOLUTIONAccording to me some information systems/processes involved ...

Fedex E-Commerce Solution
: graphic by Aabhas Rastegi: image by Aabhas Rastogi via Fed Ex Corporation (MIS)


Christie has been lagging in recent opinion polls and is in danger of not making the top 10 candidates who will participate in the next official Republican debate, on 16 September.
With real estate mogul Trump taking a hard line on illegal immigration, other Republican candidates in the 2016 White House race have sought to toughen their stances as well.

Christie did not say specifically how the system he proposes would track people the same way packages are tracked by FedEx, which scans a bar code on the package at each step in the delivery process.

A FedEx spokeswoman declined to comment on Christie’s remarks.



There were long lines at the local approaches to the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, N.J., because all but one, right, had been closed: photo by Amy Newman/Northjersey,com, 12 September 2013

Friday 28 August 2015

Unlock the Gates

.
Migrants sleep on a bench at a park in Belgrade, Serbia, Friday, Aug. 28, 2015. Over 10,000 migrants, including many women with babies and small children, have crossed into Serbia over the past few days and headed toward Hungary and the EU Schengen Area, a zone with no internal border checks between member countries

Migrants sleep on a bench at a park in Belgrade, Serbia on Friday. Over 10,000 migrants, including many women with babies and small children, have crossed into Serbia over the past few days and headed toward Hungary and the EU Schengen Area: photo by Marko Drobnjakovic/AP, 28 August 2015

Under the Wire


#migrantcrisis - A man creeps under the metal fence near Roszke, at Hungarian-Serbian border. By Csaba Segesvari #AFP
: image via Chrisophe Delattre @chrisdelattre7, 26 August 2015
 

#Hungary - #Migrants crawl under a barbed fence at the Hungarian-Serbian border near Roszke. By @afpattila @AFP: image via AFP Photo Department @AFPphoto, 26 August 2015
 

#Hungary - #Migrants crawl under a barbed fence at the Hungarian-Serbian border near Roszke. By @afpattila @AFP: image via AFP Photo Department @AFPphoto, 26 August 2015
 

#Hungary - #Migrants crawl under a barbed fence at the Hungarian-Serbian border near Roszke. By @afpattila @AFP: image via AFP Photo Department @AFPphoto, 26 August 2015
 

#Hungary - #Migrants crawl under a barbed fence at the Hungarian-Serbian border near Roszke. By @afpattila @AFP: image via AFP Photo Department @AFPphoto, 26 August 2015

Honest Chicken in Transit Zone Europe


Just drove past truck on A4 in Austria with 50 dead refugees inside. Terrible smell of death as we passed.: image via Lindsey Hulsum @lindseyhulsum, 27 August 2015 

Hungarian police arrest driver of lorry that had 71 dead migrants inside: Romanian national held after death toll in Austrian motorway tragedy is raised from initial estimate of about 50 victims: Luke harding and agencies, The Guardian, 28 August 2015

Hungarian police have arrested the driver of a lorry found on an Austrian motorway with the decomposing bodies of more than 70 people inside.


Police cars round truck in which refugees died at side of #Austrian motorway. Travelling fm Serbia, they suffocated.: image via Lindsey Hulsum @lindseyhulsum, 27 August 2015

 The man is a Romanian national, a police statement said on Friday. It came as the Austrian interior ministry confirmed it had made arrests in the case, following reports from the Krone newspaper that seven smugglers linked to the lorry had been held by authorities in Hungary. The main organisers are still at large, and believed to be in Romania, it said.

The death toll was raised on Friday from initial estimates of 20 to 50 following the discovery of the remains on Thursday morning on Austria’s A4 motorway between Neusiedl and Parndorf. The truck, which had been abandoned on the hard shoulder of the road near Parndorf, had apparently been there since Wednesday. Austrian police said all those on board appeared to have suffocated and died before they entered the country.



Forensic experts investigate a truck in which refugees were found dead in Austria
: photo by Roland Schlager/EPA, 27 August 2015

Austrian police said of the 71 dead, 59 were men, eight women and four children, and included Syrian refugees.

The lorry set off from Budapest in the early hours of Wednesday morning, and reached the Hungarian-Austrian border by 9am. It crossed into Austria that night and was spotted on the A4 at 5am or 6am on Thursday, police said.
 Forensic team at the truck containing suffocated #refugees at side of #Austrian motorway. Travelling fm Serbia, they suffocated.: image via Lindsey Hulsum @lindseyhulsum, 27 August 2015 

The state of the bodies had made establishing an exact death toll difficult. Their identities were also not known, said Hans Peter Doskozil, head of police in the eastern district of Burgenland. “The deaths already occurred some time ago,” he added. “We can make no concrete assumptions about the origin or cause [of death]. We can assume, however, that they are refugees.”



  An abandoned truck on the outskirts of Vienna was found to contain the decomposed remains the bodies of 71 people, assumed to be migrants: photo by Roland Schlager/European Pressphoto Agency, 27 August 2015

The 7.5-tonne vehicle used to belong to the Slovak chicken meat company Hyza and still has the slogan “Honest chicken” on the side. The company said it sold the lorry in 2014. According to the Hungarian government, it is registered to a Romanian citizen from the central city of Kecskemét.

Austrian forensic team at truck of dead refugees. What a terrible, necessary, heartbreaking job.: image via Lindsey Hulsum @lindseyhulsum, 27 August 2015 

Road officials said on Thursday that an employee mowing the grass alerted police after noticing putrid liquid dripping from the back of the white refrigerated vehicle. Its door had been left ajar. Detectives then made the grim discovery. 


 
An abandoned truck carrying the dead bodies of people assumed to be migrants was found in Austria on Thursday. Images in the Austrian news media showed a white vehicle with a rear cooler compartment, emblazoned with the word “Hyza” in brown letters, with a chicken standing in for the letter Y, surrounded by police cars.: photo by Roland Schlager/European Pressphoto Agency, 27 August 2015

Forensic teams at the scene examined the lorry, which has Hungarian number plates. Lindsey Hilsum of Channel 4 News tweeted that the “smell of death” at the scene was overwhelming. On Thursday afternoon, police towed the vehicle to a nearby hall and began removing bodies.


Austrian forensic team at truck. Driver reportedly fled. Bodies of #refugees still inside: image via Lindsey Hulsum @lindseyhulsum, 27 August 2015 
 
In a statement on Thursday, Austria’s interior minister, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, denounced the traffickers as criminals. “This tragedy is a concern for us all. Smugglers are criminals. They have no interest in the welfare of refugees. Only profit.”

A truck stands on the shoulder of the

A truck stands on the shoulder of the highway A4 near Parndorf south of Vienna, on Austria, Thursday. At least 20 migrants were found dead in the truck parked on the Austrian highway leading from the Hungarian border, police said
: photo by Ronald Zak/AP, 27 August 2015

The EU has found itself overwhelmed by the sheer scale of migration, with a record number of 107,500 migrants crossing the EU’s border last month. Chaotic attempts by Macedonian police to hold back refugees last week failed. On Wednesday, the UN's Refugee Agency said it expected 3,000 people a day to enter Macedonia from Greece until at least the end of the year.



Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and Bosnian Prime Minister Denis Zvizdic, from left, listen to a speech at the start of the Western Balkans Summit in the Hofburg palace in Vienna, Austria: photo by Roland Zak/AP, 27 August 2015

Berlin, backed by Austria, wants a new system of mandatory quotas for refugees across the EU despite the issue being rejected in acrimonious scenes by EU leaders at a summit in June. Germany expects 800,000 asylum applications this year. The EU has also proposed a common “safe countries of origin” list, which would see migrants from these nations swiftly deported.

With the EU’s common border policy increasingly dysfunctional, member states are taking matters into their own hands. Hungary is building a new fence along its border with Serbia, though this week refugees got through with relative ease.Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, opposes the initiative, saying: “We are not advocates of fences.”


Up to 50 dead as Austria finds truck loaded with migrant bodies
: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 27 August 2015 

On Tuesday, meanwhile, Austrian police arrested three drivers on suspicion of transporting migrants from Syria and other war-torn areas into the EU. One of them had driven 34 people packed into the back of a white van across the Austrian border.

The group included 10 small children, whom the driver abandoned by the side of the motorway near the city of Bruck an der Leitha. According to police, the migrants said in interviews they were hardly able to breathe during the trip.

They had asked repeatedly for more air, but the driver had ignored their requests, police added, and had driven without stopping from Serbia to Austria.


At least 20 migrants found dead in truck on Austria highway: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 27 August 2015

Amnesty International’s Europe deputy director, Gauri van Gulik, said countries in the region needed urgently to do more.

“People dying in their dozens –- whether crammed into a truck or a ship -– en route to seek safety or better lives is a tragic indictment of Europe’s failures to provide alternative routes,” he said. “Europe has to step up and provide protection to more, share responsibility better and show solidarity to other countries and to those most in need.”


Embedded image permalink

Investigations underway after up to 50 refugees found dead in truck in Austria:: image via Reuters Top News @Reuters, 27 August 2015

Honest Chicken Took Them On Their Last Ride

Forensic investigators are seen working on a refrigerated truck parked along a highway near Neusiedl am See, Austria, on August 27, 2015. The bodies of between 20 and 50 migrants have been found in the truck on the A 4 highway in Austria, police said Thursday, the latest tragedy involving people desperately trying to reach Europe. AFP PHOTO / DIETER NAGL

Dozens of dead migrants found in abandoned lorry in eastern Austria, near the Hungarian border. The German daily Kurier has written that the refugees suffocated to death in the lorry's cargo container, probably a long time ago. Hyza, Slovakia's leading poultry producer and processor, said in a press release that the lorry no longer belongs to the company, which sold it in 2013 or 2014. Hyza, seated in Topoľčany, west Slovakia, says on its website that since 2006 it has been a part of Agrofert, a giant holding company owned by Czech Finance Minister Andrej Babis.: photo by Czech News Agency via Prague Post, 27 August 2015

Honest Chicken says
Come with me Little Refugee
And see the world from the dark place inside
This large metal box on wheels
But don't expect to breathe too deeply
Or too often
On the long road north
And west
To the Land of Your Dreams


Iron modder entry | by Yappen All Day Long

Iron modder entry. Magpul magpul, silencer, halo sight. Fried chicken.: photo by Yappen All Day Long, 9 December 2011


 from Dal Tokyo (detail): Gary Panter, 1984; image via Fantagraphics Books, 2012

Transit Zone Europe

A ticket on the #refugee train from Macedonia to Serbia. 10 euros. Sardine room only. Fresh air through open doors.
: image via Anemona Hartocollis @anemenanyc, 26 August 2015




Migrants waiting in line for documents at a refugee processing center on Thursday in Presevo, Serbia
: photo by Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times, 27 August 2015


Embedded image permalink

@anemonanyc is traveling with migrants desperate to reach Hungary before it seals its border
: image via Palko Karasz @karaszpalko, 27 August 2015


Budapest train stations morph into makeshift refugee camps
: image via Agence France-Presse @AFP, 27 August 2015

Refugee children playing at a way station just inside #Hungary. Their families hope to reach Germany. #Syria: image via Lindsey Hulsum @lindseyhulsum, 25 August 2015 

Hard to be a refugee when you're disabled or injured. Just arrived in #Hungary. #Serbia: image via Lindsey Hulsum @lindseyhulsum, 25 August 2015 

Hundreds of refugees are camping at the railway station in #Budapest. #Hungary.: image via Lindsey Hulsum @lindseyhulsum, 26 August 2015

Afghans heading for Northern Europe - Hungarian govt won't let them take train without passports so stuck at station.: image via Lindsey Hulsum @lindseyhulsum, 26 August 2015

#Keleti station in #Budapest, temporary home to some 500 people fleeing war and poverty in #Syria, #Afghanistan, etc.: image via Lindsey Hulsum @lindseyhulsum, 26 August 2015

   #Keleti station in #Budapest, temporary home to some 500 people who've left fleeing war and poverty in #Syria, #Afghanistan, & elsewhere: image via Lindsey Hulsum @lindseyhulsum, 26 August 2015 

Across Transit Zone Europe: Long Walk, Small Promise
  ...................................................................... 
............................................................................Thousands reach Europe before border is blocked. Photo by: Armend Nimani/ AFP: image via The Times Pictures @Times Pictures, 25 August 2015 

A Syrian migrant carries children as he walks along railway track to cross Serbian border with Hungary near the village of Horgos...A Syrian migrant carries his children as he walks along a railway track to cross the Serbian border with Hungary near the village of Horgos August 27, 2015. Hungary made plans on Wednesday to reinforce its southern border with helicopters, mounted police and dogs, and was also considering using the army as record numbers of migrants, many of them Syrian refugees, passed through coils of razor-wire into Europe

......................................................................A Syrian migrant carries his children as he walks along a railway track to cross the Serbian border with Hungary near the village of Horgos on Thursday: photo by Marko Djurica/Reuters, 27 August 2015