Brussels

On Friday, the EU and Turkey came to an agreement on a set of proposals to stem the flow of Mid-East asylum seekers into Western Europe.

The focus of the discussions in Brussels was cutting off the sea route to Greece. On the front lines is the Greek island Lesbos where at least half of the 144,000 refugees who have entered Greece in 2016 have landed. More than a million people crossed the Aegean to Greece last year.

Anti-terror Belgium police arrested 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam on Friday, their top suspect in the Paris attacks that killed 130 people. He is the last of the suspected terrorists who carried out the atrocity last November, the other nine either got killed or committed suicide. VIDEO: Footage shows the moment #ParisAttacks mastermind is arrested in #Brussels earlier – @onlinemagazin pic.twitter.com/r1oSYyzj9k — Conflict News (@Conflicts) March 18, 2016 Fusion reports: A Belgian minister apparently tweeted “we got him” after the capture, but the tweet has since been deleted.

Turkey and the EU came back to the negotiating table on Thursday and Friday in Brussels in the latest installment of a long-running attempt to hammer out a deal that will help stem the flow of refugees into Europe.

Germany, Sweden, Austria, and a number of other countries are quite literally breaking under the pressure and everyone involved fears things could get far worse as winter turns to spring and the Balkan route thaws.

The European terrorist scare came back with a bang moments ago when gunfire broke out earlier today during a counterterrorism raid in the Belgian capital, local media reported. According to NBC, Belgian media reported that at least one suspect fled and at least one police officer was lightly wounded in the incident in the Forest area of the city. Police sealed off the neighborhood.

Late last month, Norwegian PM Erna Solberg proclaimed that if she became convinced that Sweden’s refugee crisis was set to spiral out of control or “break down” (as she called it), she may be prepared to close her country’s borders altogether in what would quite possibly amount to a contravention of Norway’s duties under the Geneva Convention and a move that would almost surely trigger a rash of human rights violations. 

(Solberg)