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IMMIGRATION

Police give asylum seekers bike training

Whilst Austria has stopped processing asylum requests in a bid to make the country less attractive to refugees, one town in Styria has been doing its part to help integration - by giving asylum seekers cycle safety training.

Police give asylum seekers bike training
Photo: Styrian police/Maximilian Ulrich

Local police in Judenburg say the move not only helps improve road safety in the town, but is also a way to get asylum seekers involved socially.

“Learning to give hand signals and understand road signs, as well as being able to assess dangerous situations may be a matter of course for many people, but for people from other countries it’s not – and this has nothing to do with recklessness but the fact that they haven’t learnt our system,” inspector Rudolf Pöschl told the Kronen Zeitung.

42 asylum seekers voluntarily attended an initial two-hour cycle safety training course on Sunday. They learnt how to interpret road signs, with the help of English and Arabic speakers, and then practised cycling on a course set up at a local primary school.

“All the participants were very interested, showed a lot of enthusiasm and had a lot of questions – which in my view will greatly contribute to road safety – both for the asylum seekers and locals. It should also help improve and reduce tensions between asylum seekers and the police,” Pöschl said. He added that more training sessions are planned.

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FAR-RIGHT

Germany issues entry ban to Austrian far-right activist Sellner

Radical Austrian nationalist Martin Sellner has been banned from entering Germany, it emerged on Tuesday, days after he was deported from Switzerland.

Germany issues entry ban to Austrian far-right activist Sellner

Sellner, a leader of Austria’s white pride Identitarian Movement, posted a video of himself on X, formerly Twitter, reading out a letter he said was from the city of Potsdam.

A spokeswoman for the city authorities confirmed to AFP that an EU citizen had been served with a “ban on their freedom of movement in Germany”.

The person can no longer enter or stay in Germany “with immediate effect” and could be stopped by police or deported if they try to enter the country, the spokeswoman said, declining to name the individual for privacy reasons.

READ ALSO: Who is Austria’s far-right figurehead banned across Europe?

“We have to show that the state is not powerless and will use its legitimate means,” Mike Schubert, the mayor of Potsdam, said in a statement.

Sellner caused an uproar in Germany after allegedly discussing the Identitarian concept of “remigration” with members of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) at a meeting in Potsdam in November.

Reports of the meeting sparked a huge wave of protests against the AfD, with tens of thousands of Germans attending demonstrations across the country.

READ ALSO:

Swiss police said Sunday they had prevented a hundred-strong far-right gathering due to be addressed by Sellner, adding that he had been arrested and deported.

The Saturday meeting had been organised by the far-right Junge Tat group, known for its anti-immigration and anti-Islamic views.

The group is also a proponent of the far-right white nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory espoused by Sellner’s Identitarian Movement.

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