Archive for November 2006

U.S. law enforcement agencies are struggling with the threat of lawsuits regarding the conduct of officers.

Officials said the threat has become so acute that many officers would rather die than be sued. They said this has seriously hurt law enforcement and endangered the lives of officers.

“Some officers today are more afraid of being sued than being murdered,” Olympia Fields, Ill. Police Chief Jeff Chudwin said.

In a recent address to a police convention, Mr. Chudwin said the actions of numerous officers have created additional victims of crimes. He said officers often avoid using deadly force even when it’s legal and required.

“If you’re putting an offender at the top of the list for safety, then you have your priorities screwed up,” Mr. Chudwin told the Association of SWAT Personnel-Wisconsin. “Why are we catering to the person who created the problem?”

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LONDON: DNA comparisons: Gains (red), losses (yellow), the same (green). Scientists have shown that our genetic code varies between individuals far more than was previously thought.

A UK-led team made a detailed analysis of the DNA found in 270 people and identified vast stretches in their codes to be duplicated or even missing.

A great many of these variations are in areas of the genome that would not damage our health, Matthew Hurles and colleagues told the journal Nature.

But others are - and can be shown to play a role in a number of disorders.

To date, the investigation of the human genome has tended to focus on very small changes in DNA that can have deleterious effects - at the scale of just one or a few bases, or “letters”, in the biochemical code that programs cellular activity.

And for many years, scientists have also been able to look through microscopes to see very large-scale abnormalities that arise when whole DNA bundles, or chromosomes, are truncated or duplicated.

But it is only recently that researchers have developed the molecular “tools” to focus on medium-scale variations of the code - at the scale of thousands of DNA letters.

This analysis of so-called copy number variation (CNV) has now revealed some startling results.

It would seem the assumption that the DNA of any two humans is 99.9% similar in content and identity no longer holds.

The double-stranded DNA molecule is held together by chemical components called bases Adenine (A) bonds with thymine (T); cytosine(C) bonds with guanine (G)

These “letters” form the “code of life”; there are about 2.9 billion base-pairs in the human genome wound into 24 distinct bundles, or chromosomes

Written in the DNA are about 20-25,000 genes which human cells use as starting templates to make proteins; these sophisticated molecules build and maintain our bodies

The researchers were astonished to locate 1,447 CNVs in nearly 2,900 genes, the starting “templates” written in the code that are used by cells to make the proteins which drive our bodies. This is a huge, hitherto unrecognised, level of variation between one individual and the next.

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After months of wrangling over a proposed immigration crackdown, village trustees in Carpentersville now will steer their frustration to the federal government.

The board tonight will consider a resolution criticizing the federal government’s failure to aggressively address the issue.

Under the Immigration Reform Resolution, village officials will “request action by the President and the Congress of the United States of America to effect immigration reform.”

The resolution comes more than a month after trustees voted in a contentious 4-3 decision to postpone discussion on the proposed Illegal Alien Immigration Act until pending litigation in other towns is resolved.

The proposed ordinance sought to fine and penalize landlords and business owners who rent to or hire illegal immigrants. The measure would also recognize English as the official village language.

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There are some ideas so ludicrous and mischievous that only an academic would take them seriously. One of them is diversity. Think about it. Are you for or against diversity? When’s the last time you said to yourself, “I’d better have a little more diversity in my life”? What would you think if you heard a Microsoft director tell his fellow board members that the company should have more diversity and manufacture kitchenware, children’s clothing and shoes? You’d probably think the director was smoking something illegal.

Our institutions of higher learning take diversity seriously and make it a multimillion-dollar operation. Juilliard School has a director of diversity and inclusion; Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a manager of diversity recruitment; Toledo University, an associate dean for diversity; the universities of Harvard, Texas A&M, California at Berkeley, Virginia and many others boast of officers, deans, vice-presidents and perhaps ministers of diversity.

George Leef, director of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, N.C., writes about this in an article titled “Some Questions about Diversity” in the Oct. 5 issue of “Clarion Call.” Mr. Leef suggests that only in academia is diversity pursued for its own sake, but there’s a problem: Everyone, even if they are the same ethnicity, nationality or religion, is different. Suppose two people are from the same town in Italy. They might differ in many important respects: views on morality, religious and political beliefs, recreation preferences and other characteristics.

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We were free in early childhood. Pioneer tie let us breathe freely, books for children inspired for heroism and adventures. The air was the best as everything in our country.

Children were free to speak about everything, no one deprived us of the right for peaceful associations. Schools needed no military guard.

We had no idea that there, in the adult world, people ‘crabbed’ to KGB, joined the Communist Party only for the sake of their careers, gave bribers, stole and bought deficit goods by backstairs influence.

We, who were born in 1970s, learnt those things post factum when adults started tearing the country we loved.

When adults took our Motherland away for the first time, we subconsciously understood they were doing something wrong. They defamed names of the people our pioneer units were named after.

At the same time they preferred to keep silent about their former party membership, they were reluctant to give out KGB whistlers, they converted bribe tariffs into US dollars, they shared plants and factories which originally belonged to people.

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“When you are a policeman you see the consequences of the decisions made by our politicians in a very real way. The immigration policy of Sweden is basically a total failure. Moreover, this experiment is costing enormous sums each and every year. Politicians are now afterwards trying to patch and mend, coming up with various ideas and measures. But it’s totally obvious to every thinking human being that it is about to go to hell – in plain speech.”

These are the words of a chief police officer who has been working for many years in Malmö, to Folkets Nyheter, about his work situation which has changed dramatically in those years. And he is perfectly clear on what it is that has caused these negative changes.

Malmö is one of Sweden’s most immigrant dense cities, 40 percent of the inhabitants are of an entirely foreign background. And just as in many of the other cities of the country, serious violence and robbery, and the fear among Swedes to fall victim to these crimes, has become a part of everyday life in Malmö.

Sydsvenskan, a news paper circulated in the southern Swedish province of Skåne where Malmö is situated, claimed in an editorial earlier this year that democracy in Sweden is intact and that debate is practically unconstrained. Yet, Folkets Nyheter is forced to interview the police man anonymously, in order not to put him in jeopardy of losing his job.

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It’s a split-second decision all crime victims face when confronted by a robber, rapist or burglar: Obey the criminal or fight back.

A growing number of Cincinnatians have chosen to fight.

Cincinnati police say at least nine homicides this year could qualify as justified because the killers say they were fending off criminals who intended to harm them. Last year, police reported one justified homicide.

Would-be victims include a deli owner defending his business in Winton Place, a motorist running down an assault suspect in Mount Washington and a Kennedy Heights man who shot and killed a teenager attempting to steal his car.

Police aren’t sure why more people are fighting back, but some see a natural response to violent crime in a city where shootings and homicides are on the rise.

“People just want to protect themselves and their families,” said Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters. “People are living in fear of what’s going on in this community.”

Prosecutors must review every self-defense claim, but Deters already has found that the use of deadly force was justified in at least three of this year’s cases.

The most recent decision came Friday, when prosecutors chose not to pursue criminal charges against Bennie Hall, the Kennedy Heights man who shot and killed 14-year-old Quavale Finnell on Oct. 23.

Deters said Hall fired his .45-caliber handgun as Finnell drove Hall’s car at him.

“I was just protecting myself,” Hall said. “I’m not a vigilante.”

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An open letter to Mayor Corey Booker:

Can I be white and live in Newark? I ask you mayor, because after residing here for more than a year, the police have questioned and harassed me numerous times only for reason that I am a white person in Newark. Apparently, in “Brick City” if you’re a white person and you’re not wearing a suit and tie and walking into the Prudential building, you automatically become in the eyes of Newark Police a drug user. And this is no fib. As one policeman told me in a humorous tone, “What? You didn’t know we profile, white boy?”

As a student of Rutgers-Newark, this is deeply troubling. How can I, as a resident of this city, be treated as an invader? Already students and academics are dissuaded from coming to Newark because of the blatant poverty that exists here. Nonetheless, campus police give the school a feeling of security. This, of course, is due to the aims of school security which is to protect, rather than prosecute. By contrast, I find the latter to be the motive of Newark Police.

From my experiences I have found cops in Newark to be overly aggressive and outright disrespectful of people’s rights (not just towards whites, but also Latinos and blacks). Simply put, they seem too motivated to throw people in jail.

So I pose the question to you again, MayorBooker. Can I be white and live in Newark? Or better yet, can you as the mayor, the leader of this city, create an environment that welcomes people of all races and classes? You came into office with the promise to secure safety for all the people of Newark and I supported that idea. But will it be realized? For my sake and yours I hope it will.

Home Secretary for the United Kingdom, John Reid, revealed this week a renewed effort as part of on-going plans to arrest Britons involved in people-smuggling and to identify and assess fines against companies that hire illegal immigrants. Efforts to encourage and assist the public in reporting suspects and to provide other resources are also underway.

Increased Police Force

400 police constables and 40 sergeants are being assigned to specialized duty with the Immigration and Nationality Directorate in a push to tighten up control of illegal immigration activities. Coupled with an additional 360 newly hired immigration officers, it will boost the IND force to a total of 800 personnel currently dedicated to the task, overall an increase of 25%.

The Tories say that police were “badly needed” on the beat, while the Liberal Democrats want new police hired, not a redeployment of existing staff.

A Home Office spokeswoman insisted “We are very clear that we do not want this to have an impact on police officers’ frontline work.”

“There won’t be any police officers taken off the front line,” she said.

The shadow home secretary David Davis criticised the government’s record on the subject. “Over the last nine years, we have actually seen immigration officers instructed not to arrest illegal immigrants, merely to meet the prime minister’s artificial targets on removing failed asylum-seekers.”

“People-trafficking and all its associated evils is one of the fastest-growing and most vicious crimes, yet the government’s policy so far has been one of neglect.”

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HIGHLAND HEIGHTS - A new political group has sprung up at Northern Kentucky University that is aimed at informing students about what they say are the perils of illegal immigration.

College Students for Security (CSS), a conservative group that was born during NKU College Republicans meeting, focuses on combating illegal immigration in the United States.

“As College Republicans, we had the idea to take the single issue of illegal immigration and focus on it,” NKU College Republican President Eric Cranley said. “This was such a hot topic during the elections and an issue that a lot of campaigns focused on.”

Steve Ward, a member of College Republicans and a founding force behind CSS, said he hopes the group will soon become recognized by the university.

“We have 15 people already signed up so all we need now is a faculty advisor,” Ward said. “We haven’t asked anyone yet to be the advisor but we’re getting ready to.”

Ward and Cranley are both senior Business Information Systems majors and they said that while the group was the brainchild of the Republicans, it’s really a group for anyone concerned with national security.

“Immigrants crossing the boarders and coming in freely affect a lot of things,” Ward said. “We’re not looking to protest anything, the group just wants to inform students about what is going on in the world. With our boarders being so open, any unknown terrorist can come in.”

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