Archive for September 2007

CAIRO (Thomson Financial) - The Arab League today firmly rejected a US plan to divide Iraq on ethnic and religious lines, instead lambasting Washington for destroying Iraq and turning it into the main base for Al-Qaeda.

The declaration came after the US Senate yesterday passed a non-binding resolution on a Bosnia-style plan to divide Iraq that has been touted as a way out of the sectarian strife rising steadily since the 2003 US-led invasion.

Arab nations should ’stand by the Iraqi people to help position them against this plan which is against Arab interests,’ the League’s pointman for Iraq, Ali al-Garush told journalists.

‘The truth about what America has done is that its weapons have caused massive destruction of Iraq, that it has drawn Al-Qaeda to Iraq and that it has transformed Iraq into the main base for Al-Qaeda,’ Garush said.

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WE have heard little in this year’s political debate about immigration or multiculturalism, although immigration is running at record levels.

Yet a change of government has the potential to bring with it a marked change in both these policy areas, and one that most Australians may not like much.

Kevin Rudd has, as on other issues, kept a low profile and told his shadow immigration minister to do the same. It has been left to Paul Keating to remind us what things were like under the Hawke and Keating governments, with his attack on John Howard earlier this year.

Keating said then that when Howard disparaged elites over what he celebrated as the mainstream, he was in fact disparaging cosmopolitan attitudes vis-a-vis the certainties of the old monoculture. There was even a comparison drawn and then withdrawn between Howard’s populist appeal to ordinary Australians and Hitler’s to the German volk.

In the Labor years it was the role of cosmopolitan elites to keep ordinary, red-necked Australians and their inherent racism on the straight and narrow. It was an era of stifling political correctness, where critics were howled down with cries of racist by the cosmopolitan internationalist elites of the progressive Left.

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Scientists have developed a computer model that uses census data to predict outbreaks of ethnic conflict.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is president of New England Complex Systems Institute and co-author of the 2007 study. He tries to understand how ethnic groups interact with a local environment. He told Earth & Sky that it’s the nature of ethnic groups to impose certain cultural behaviors not just on members of their own group, but on the region with which they associate their identity.

And if there are no clear physical boundaries between themselves and other groups in the region, conflicts are inevitable.

Yaneer Bar-Yam: You can look at all of the details of individual events and who’s doing what and who’s responsible for what action. But if you try to look at where the violence is taking place – not just which country, but which local region of the country violence is taking place – it really can be predicted just by the spacial arrangement of people in that area.

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Just one in 10 schoolchildren in some parts of England are of white British origin as growing numbers come from ethnic minority backgrounds.

More than a fifth of pupils are now of ethnic minority origin while an increasing proportion do not speak English as their first language.

The latest figures from the Department for Children, Schools and Families revealed dramatic variations in the ethnic make-up of school populations across England.

The proportion of ethnic minority pupils was higher in primary schools than secondaries, according to the January 2007 school census.

In Tower Hamlets, east London, just under 15% of primary school children were classed as white British, compared to 63% who were Bangladeshi Asian.

In Newham, also in east London, just under 12% of primary pupils were white British but in Bromley, in the south of the city, the figure was 79%.

In Brent secondary schools in north-west London, just 7% of pupils were of white British origin - 36% were classed as Asian, and 24% black.

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KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - A routine city hall appointment threatens to turn Kansas City into a new front in the U.S. debate over illegal immigration, even though the closest Mexico border crossing is hundreds of miles (kilometers) away.

Anger has been simmering among Hispanic leaders since the summer, when newly elected Mayor Mark Funkhouser appointed Frances Semler, a dues-paying member of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC), to the city’s parks and recreation board.

Critics say the group is a racist band of vigilantes patrolling the Mexican border with guns and intimidation.

“The Minuteman is an extremist group … espousing hate and sometimes violence,” said Janet Murguia, chief executive of The National Council of La Raza, the largest U.S. Hispanic advocacy group.

The Minutemen, who count about 9,000 members nationally and have a stated mission of helping apprehend “those who violate our borders,” counters that it wants only to uphold the law. It says opponents are the ones promoting hatred and law-breaking.

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CHICAGO, 25 (UPI) — U.S. researchers found just 7 percent of respondents do not have the usual human tendency to favor one’s own group and not form racial prejudices.

Their study, published in the journal Psychological Science, found the 7 percent of people that showed no racial bias differed from biased individuals in a fundamental way — they also were less likely to form negative emotional associations in general.

Robert Livingston of Northwestern University and Brian Drwecki of the University of Wisconsin asked white college students to do tasks that repeatedly paired unfamiliar Chinese characters with positive or negative images such as puppies or snakes. The results showed non-biased individuals were less likely than biased individuals to acquire negative emotions toward the character paired with negative pictures.

“Just as it is difficult to change visceral reactions to aversive foods — for example lima beans — through sheer force of will, it may also be difficult to change visceral attitudes toward racial groups by acknowledging that prejudice is wrong and wanting to change,” Livingston says.

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A white Paterson police officer is suing the city and Police Department on charges that he is a victim of racial discrimination.

Officer David Hopper, a 23-year veteran of the force, claims in his federal civil rights suit that, during his tenure as a juvenile division detective, he was “subjected to a regular and pervasive hostile work environment because of his Caucasian race.”

Detective Michael Howe, who is black and who is named as a defendant in the civil suit, allegedly told Hopper that he could not sit on one side of the division’s office because “this side is only for brothers, and you ain’t no brother.”

The civil suit claims that Hopper’s complaints about alleged racism in the department were repeatedly ignored by his commander, Lt. Calvin Swann, who is also black and named as a defendant in the case, and that Howe allegedly said he would use his political connections to avoid trouble.

Lastly, the suit claims that Hopper was punished for speaking out. Two months after he filed formal complaints about alleged racial abuse, Hopper was transferred from the juvenile division to an overnight shift in the Paterson cell block, according to the civil suit.

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Troy, N.Y. — A group of computer scientists, mathematicians, and biologists from around the world have developed a computer algorithm that can help trace the genetic ancestry of thousands of individuals in minutes, without any prior knowledge of their background. The team’s findings will be published in the September 2007 edition of the journal PLoS Genetics.

Unlike previous computer programs of its kind that require prior knowledge of an individual’s ancestry and background, this new algorithm looks for specific DNA markers known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced snips), and needs nothing more than a DNA sample in the form of a simple cheek swab. The researchers used genetic data from previous studies to perform and confirm their research, including the new HapMap database, which is working to uncover and map variations in the human genome.

“Now that we have found that the program works well, we hope to implement it on a much larger scale, using hundreds of thousands of SNPs and thousands of individuals,” said Petros Drineas, the senior author of the study and assistant professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “The program will be a valuable tool for understanding our genetic ancestry and targeting drugs and other medical treatments because it might be possible that these can affect people of different ancestry in very different ways.”

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Immigration hawks have been on a winning streak lately. An unprecedented surge of public outrage at the prospect of amnesty for illegal immigrants led to the defeat in June of the Senate immigration bill and the probable end of President Bush’s dream for comprehensive immigration reform. And that was merely the latest in a series of victories for supporters of tighter controls, including the Real ID Act of 2005, the Secure Fence Act of 2006, proliferating enforcement efforts at the state and local levels and a new package of modest but meaningful enforcement measures announced last month by the Department of Homeland Security.

What of the results? Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told The Times that “there will be some unhappy consequences for the economy out of doing this.” While the enforcement climate is still too new to show results in government data one way or the other, Chertoff’s prediction doesn’t appear to be playing out. On the contrary, there is extensive anecdotal evidence that enforcement is actually having its desired effects: More illegal aliens are going home, leading to improved conditions for American workers and communities.

The first consequence of stepped-up enforcement is attrition of the illegal population — a steady decrease in the total number of illegal aliens as more people give up and go home. Attrition is the real alternative to amnesty, and we’re seeing it work.

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In our repressive world of thoughtcrime and guiltspeak, it now takes great courage to tell the truth, even when it’s obvious. Fortunately there are a few brave people prepared to do it, and Julie Spence, the chief constable of Cambridgeshire, is one of them. Last week she courageously said the unsayable and pointed out that the large numbers of recent immigrants are causing serious problems in her manor.

Dangerous crime, such as drink driving, human trafficking, credit card fraud and knife crime, has gone up substantially and her officers are now having to deal with people speaking nearly 100 different foreign languages. The cost in translation fees for Cambridgeshire is close to £1m a year.

Some people might discount the claims made by Spence and her detailed report into the impact of immigration on her force as a crude way of getting more money out of the government. Others might say that the police all too often use their resources badly anyway, and what’s needed is probably better management rather than more money. But all that is beside the point. What she has made clear is blindingly obvious - a large and sudden influx of immigrants, whatever advantages they might bring, will inevitably come at very great cost, in many different ways. What’s true of Cambridgeshire is true of the country as a whole, and not just in policing. How strange it is, and how late, that it is beginning to be possible to say such a thing without being denounced as a neo-Nazi.

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