Russia Foreign Ministry Official: make Skripka's comment on ghetto the official motto of Eurovision

On 20 April, the Ukrainskaya Pravda newspaper published an interview with Oleg Skripka, the lead singer of the band of Vopli Vidopliassova. He said, “People who cannot learn Ukrainian have a low IQ. They get diagnosed with mental retardation. These people should be separated from the others because they are dangerous. We should make a ghetto for them. We will help such people, like we help people with problems. We will sing the ‘Vladimirsky Tsentral’* song to them for free.”
Earlier, Skripka called to ban the Russian language and Russian culture in Ukraine. He proposed to bar people who don’t speak Ukrainian from holding government jobs, and to cancel the licenses of “anti-Ukrainian” TV-channels, in order to solve the contradictions between the western and eastern parts of Ukraine.
On April 22nd, after speaking with the prank caller Vovan, who introduced himself as the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Arsen Avakov, Skripka commented on his statement about making a ghetto for Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who could not learn Ukrainian. The musician accused the Ukrainskaya Pravda newspaper of taking his words out of context. He did not apologize saying Russian-speaking Ukrainians have a “low IQ”, nor for saying that such people should be kept separate from others. Of note, Skripka spoke Russian to the supposed Minister of Internal Affairs thus completely forgetting his previous demands of banning the people with no knowledge of Ukrainian from working for the government. Later in the evening of the same day, after finding out that he had become the victim of a prank call, Skripka finally publicly apologized for his words. At the same time, the musician stated that this prank call was a provocation against Ukraine rather than against him.

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Syrian ambassador: Many Kurds oppose federalizing the Syrian Arab Republic

“Now the Kurdish topic: The Kurds are an integral part of the Syrian people. They have the same rights and responsibilities as other Syrians. As you know, Syria is a multiethnic and multi-confessional country, and all Syrian citizens are equal”, said Riyad Hadda.
The diplomat emphasized that there are both regional and international forces which use “the Kurdish question” for their own destructive goals.
“I would like to note that, actually, many Kurds oppose any forms of disintegration, be it a federation, or cantons, or anything of the like. Therefore, we say always that Syria is able and ready to resolve this crisis independently without intervention from the outside”, according the ambassador.

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Mamikonyan: Children are abducted from their families under the most monstrous pretexts

RVS chairwoman’s speech also acted as the presentation of the RVS’ report to the Russian president about the practice of abducting children from families in Russia. As the RVS uncovered, the abduction of children often happens in public places, schools, hospitals, without warning the parents. As a result, the family is faced with an accomplished fact, “the child has been taken away by an inter-departmental commission,” the RVS chairman said.
Another reason for seizing children is for supposedly being unsupervised. Quite commonly, the seizure occurs simply because the child was not accompanied by legal representatives, which are his parents. That is, if the child was not with his parents, but with other adults, for instance, his grandmother, then this could be the reason for considering this as a case of “being unsupervised”, with the child being subsequently seized. For officials, it has become the norm that the child should always be accompanied by legal representatives, and the grandmother is considered to be nobody for the child, Maria Mamikonyan said.
The RVS leader said that Children’s service are quite confident that “porridge is not a food”, and they can take children from their family because of an insufficient assortment of food in the refrigerator. She also added that the absence of a separate bed for a child in a large family became another reason for seizure. According to the law, local authorities must allocate adequate housing to large families; but instead, the officials decided to take the children away.

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