Europe

Czech President Milos Zeman has called the migrant crisis in Europe “an organised invasion”, saying that young men arriving into Europe from Syria and Iraq should instead fight ISIS.  “I am profoundly convinced that we are facing an organised invasion and not a spontaneous movement of refugees,” Zeman said in a Christmas message on Saturday. Yahoo News reports: He went on to say that compassion was “possible” for refugees who are old or sick and for children, but not for young men who in his view should be back home fighting against jihadists.

With the topic of global (im)migration getting increasingly more prominence as we get ever closer to the presidential elections, not to mention Europe's ongoing plight with the biggest refugee crisis since World War II, here is a handful of factual, and bias-free, charts summarizing the key aspects of global human mobility.

First, here is a summary tracker of global people flows since the start of the century. The countries in gray are sources of net people outflows, while those in blue have seen cumulative immigration over the past 15 years.

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two years later when Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the red army tanks in front of Moscow’s White House, a dark era in human history came to an end.

Back on September 11, Zero Hedge accurately predicted not only the terrorist events which unfolded in Paris on November 13, but also the resulting aftermath with uncanny accuracy.

If there’s a silver lining in Turkey’s brazen move to shoot down a Russian Su-24 near the Syrian border late last month, it’s that it gave Putin the excuse he needed to expose Ankara’s role in bankrolling Sunni extremism in the Mid-East.