Archive for December 2007

KIPI, Greece: Nowhere is the pressure on the European Union’s borders mounting as insistently as in this northernmost corner of the Aegean Sea across the river from Turkey.

With the help of smugglers, dozens of migrants breach this frontier daily on foot, in plastic boats, by swimming, or crouched inside empty oil tankers or secret compartments of trucks.

In its zeal to secure the border, Greece is being accused of serious lapses in human rights and ignoring treaty pledges that bind it to give haven to refugees claiming protection - rights established under international conventions.

“There are serious problems with the asylum system in Greece,” said William Spindler, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. “It doesn’t meet European or international standards.”

Would-be immigrants - Iraqis, Palestinians, Afghanis and others - are arriving here in numbers bigger than ever before. Their ranks are swollen by a “huge and very sudden influx” that began in September, according to Pangiotis Papadimitriou, the border monitoring officer for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

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MEXICO CITY - Biologist Karen Krebbs used to study bats in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on the Arizona-Mexico border. Then, she got tired of dodging drug smugglers all night.

“I use night-vision goggles, and you could see them very clearly” - caravans of men with guns and huge backpacks full of drugs, trudging through the desert, Krebbs said. After her 10th or 11th time hiding in bushes and behind rocks, she abandoned her research.

“I’m just not willing to risk my neck anymore,” she said.

Across the southwestern U.S. border and in northern Mexico, scientists such as Krebbs say their work is increasingly threatened by smugglers as tighter border security pushes trafficking into the most remote areas where botanists, zoologists and geologists do their research.

“In the last year, it’s gotten much worse,” said Jack Childs, who uses infrared cameras to study endangered jaguars in eastern Arizona. He loses one or two of the cameras every month to smugglers.

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Politically correct ‘non-jobs’ costing the taxpayer almost £600million have been advertised in the past year, it emerged last night.

The 15,700 posts were offered by local councils and quangos in the Guardian newspaper’s controversial ‘Jobzilla’ Society section.

They paid an average salary of £38,000 – a fifth more than in the private sector.

They included a raft of politically correct jobs, according to the TaxPayers’ Alliance pressure group.

Examples ranged from a community empowerment network programme manager at Thurrock Council in Essex – paying almost £30,000 – to assistant chief executive (value for money) at Charnwood Borough Council in Leicestershire.

The latter post – supposed to save the taxpayer money – pays £55,000 a year.

In November alone, Hackney Council and the East London NHS Foundation Trust each offered three separate equality and diversity jobs paying £39,030 each – a total salary bill of more than £225,000.

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In the summer of 2002, the FBI, the Baton Rouge Police Department, and several other agencies began a massive search for a serial killer suspected of murdering three women. Based on an FBI profile and an eyewitness report, they upended southern Louisiana looking for a white man who drives a white pickup, collecting DNA from more than 1,000 Caucasian males. They found nothing. Meanwhile, the killer struck again.

In March 2003, investigators turned to Tony Frudakis, a molecular biologist who said he could determine the suspect’s race by analyzing his DNA. Uncertain about the science, the police asked Frudakis to take a blind test: They sent him DNA swabs from 20 people to see if he could identify their races. He nailed every one.

On a conference call a few weeks later, Frudakis reported his results on their killer. “Your guy could be African-American or Afro-Caribbean, but there is no chance that this is a Caucasian.” There was a prolonged silence, followed by a flurry of questions. They all came down to this: Would Frudakis bet his life on his results? Absolutely.

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Despite opposition on Capitol Hill, Shawnee native Julie Myers recently won the U.S. Senate’s approval to continue leading the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

The Kansas City Star talked Thursday with Myers about her plans for the agency in 2008.

In her two years leading the agency, Myers has won kudos for increasing deportations of illegal immigrants.

But she also was criticized by Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, for not pressing forward with more criminal investigations of people who employ illegal immigrants. Myers’ actions at an agency Halloween party, where she praised the originality of an ICE worker’s costume of dreadlocks, jail outfit and face makeup, also angered McCaskill and other senators.

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Copenhagen - The Danish People’s Party that supports Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s minority government expressed doubts Friday over the extension of the passport-free zone in Europe under the Schengen treaty. “We know that organized crime committed by eastern Europeans is a growing problem in Denmark and with the extension of the Schengen cooperation, many pickpockets, drug smugglers and human traffickers can enter the country without being checked,” the party’s European affairs spokesman Morten Messerschmidt told broadcaster DR.

“It does not add up, when we on the one hand demand that our police should secure safety on streets and alleys, and on the other uncritically allow entry to everyone just because they arrive from a EU country,” he added.

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LEADING ethnic groups have been forced to dramatically cut staff numbers and many have already started scaling back programs because the Premier’s department has not yet bothered to reveal next year’s grant recipients.

The Ethnic Communities’ Council of NSW is one of the groups that will have to axe jobs because it is still waiting to hear whether the Community Development Grants Program, the responsibility of the Premier, Morris Iemma, will fund its programs.

Several positions at the council - including roles in its Newcastle and Illawarra offices - requiring a total outlay of about $150,000 have not been renewed. Other groups, which rely on the grants to fund administrative jobs, also have not renewed contracts.

More than 150 community groups - ranging from the African Communities Council to the Lebanese Community Council - were given grants this year but the Greens MP John Kaye said scores had been “left hanging” because of the Government’s tardiness.

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On. Jan. 1, Tennessee will join one other state in doing what many say the federal government does not: forcing employers to hire only legal workers.

Here and in Arizona, employers that knowingly hire illegal immigrants will be forced to fire them. Those caught again in a three-year period can lose their business licenses for one year in Tennessee and permanently in Arizona. A similar Oklahoma law will be effective in July.

“I think we’ve got a strong law. Things will probably start out slow,” said state Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro, one of the law’s sponsors. “But I think by March, we are going to start seeing an increase in the number of illegals moving to other states.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona is challenging that state’s law. A federal judge on Friday refused to delay its Jan. 1 start, but an appeal and other suits are pending. At issue is whether states can impose requirements and penalties that conflict with federal law.

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And nearly 100,000 switched careers between 2000 and 2005 - more than double the number that left in the preceding five-year period.

The Tories say their findings - based on government figures - point to rising numbers leaving the profession because of poor class discipline and red tape.

But Schools Minister Jim Knight said recruitment was “buoyant”.

Figures also show that thousands of people who train and qualify as teachers never go on to work in schools and this appears to have increased in recent years.

The government statistics show that of those who qualified in 2000, 2,100 never taught in schools. This rose steadily to 2005 (the latest available), when 7,900 of those who qualified have never taught.

Shadow schools secretary Michael Gove said teaching talent was “going to waste”.

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If you’re like I am, you’ve heard scores of media reports about the 2006 Duke University rape case, in which three white lacrosse players were falsely accused of raping a black stripper at a wild party at the home of one of the team members. These guys, convicted by the news media and Duke faculty, were later found innocent. It turned out that Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong was running for re-election. In seeking the black vote, he concealed DNA evidence that would have exonerated the lacrosse players.

You might remember hearing scores of stories about the 1998 murder of James Byrd, a black man who was stripped, chained to a pickup truck and dragged through the streets until he was decapitated in Jasper, Texas. The incident provided fodder for the NAACP and others to attack then-Texas Gov. George Bush, during his 2000 election campaign, for not supporting hate crime legislation. It turned out that two of Byrd’s murderers were sentenced to death, and the other, life in prison.

I don’t know about you, but it was just recently that I heard about a gruesome murder in Knoxville, Tenn., that is far worse than the false charges in the Duke rape case and is at least as horrible, if not more so, than the dragging death of James Byrd. Unlike the Duke rape case and the Jasper lynching, the national news media’s coverage of the interracial Knoxville murders paled in comparison. On Jan. 6, 2007, University of Tennessee student Channon Christian and her boyfriend, Christopher Newsom, were carjacked and kidnapped in Knoxville. Both of them were later murdered.

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