Austria moves to ban full-face veil in public spaces
Austria's coalition government has announced plans to ban full-face veils in public and to restrict eastern European workers' access to the country's labour market.
The proposals were announced late on Monday as part of a wider government programme aimed at countering the rise of the far-right, anti-Islam Freedom Party.
"The full-face veil will be banned in public spaces," said Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern after ministers signed off on the new programme of policies set to be implemented over the next 18 months.
Kern said he wanted to avoid "giving 600,000 Muslims in Austria the feeling that they are not part of our society".
The 35-page programme also includes beefing up surveillance and security measures, obliging migrants granted the right to stay to sign an "integration contract" and a "statement of values".
"Those who are not prepared to accept Enlightenment values will have to leave our country and society," according to the text.
It also promises the government will lower taxes and non-wage labour costs, restrict access of foreign workers to the Austrian labour market and create 70,000 new jobs.
Many of the measures set out in the programme must be hammered out in detail and receive parliamentary approval before they can come into force.
The move comes eight months after Kern, 51, replaced Werner Faymann at the head of an unhappy "grand coalition" between his Social Democrats and the centre-right People's Party .
Both are facing a strong challenge from the Freedom Party, which like similar groups across Europe has stoked concerns about immigration, security and the European Union to top opinion polls.
Last month the Freedom Party candidate came close to winning Austria's presidential election.
With a parliamentary election due next year, Kern of the Social Democratic Party hopes the package will provide fresh impetus to an eight-month-old coalition widely seen as ineffective.
"We agreed that we must work faster and more clearly," conservative Vice Chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner told a joint news conference.
"It is now up to us to do what governing parties do, namely implement the programme."
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/...-face-veil-public-spaces-170131131559685.html
Dutch mosques lock doors at prayers after Canada attack
Four of the largest mosques in the Netherlands said on Monday that they will shut their doors during major prayer meetings after six people were killed in an attack on a Canadian mosque .
The Blue Mosque in Amsterdam, The Hague's as-Sunnah Mosque, Rotterdam's Essalam Mosque and the Omar Al Farouq Mosque in Utrecht said in a statement: "We feel compelled to close mosque doors during prayers".
Additional safety cameras have also been set up at the Blue Mosque, which is in the southwestern suburbs of the Dutch capital.
Several thousand people attend prayers at the four mosques daily.
"Merciless acts such as in Quebec contribute to the growing global hatred of Muslims," Said Bouharrou, of the Dutch Moroccan Council of Mosques (RMMN), told the AFP news agency.
Six people died and eight were wounded late on Sunday when gunmen opened fire at a Quebec City mosque, in a shooting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a "terrorist attack".
"A mosque is an open building that should be accessible at any time of day to all people looking for peace and calm. But we have to be alert against these terror attacks. It's disappointing that these stringent safety measures should be put in place," Bouharrou said, adding that mosque leaders were in close contact with the Dutch National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/...rs-prayers-canada-attack-170130142613885.html
