Archive for August 2008

The British student raped in an asylum seekers camp in Calais has told police she knows she was naive to go there alone - but was only trying to highlight the plight of those living there.

The woman, who is studying journalism, is now bravely vowing to stay in France to help police there track down her attacker.

Fresh clues yesterday suggested he fled to England on a ferry after the attack at the camp, called The Jungle. It has since emerged that the rape victim, who can’t be named, took a picture of the attacker - believed to be a gangmaster - which police are using in their hunt.

French State Prosecutor Philippe Muller said: “She knows she was naive going into a place like The Jungle alone. But she was trying to help these people - she was trying to write about their lives and highlight the problems many of them have. She had been to the area three times before and this man had built up her trust.

“He tricked her and she is scared that another person will have to go through the same ordeal. That’s why she is staying in France at this time rather than going home, so she can do all she can to help the police.”
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Vienna - Rising prices and immigration are emerging as key topics in Austrian general elections due September 28, with right-wing parties expected to win up to 25 per cent of votes. Shortly after Social Democratic Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer stepped down as party chief in June, the conservative People’s Party (OVPe), the junior partner in government, announced the end of the coalition and called for early parliamentary elections.

Starting into the short campaign, several political parties held their opening rallies over the weekend.

Werner Faymann, new head of the Social Democratic Party (SPOe), renewed his call for halving the sales tax on food from 10 to five per cent, in order to help people affected by inflation.

The measure, which Faymann would like to be passed by parliament before the polls, was necessary “so that purchasing power gets stronger again,” Faymann said at a rally on Friday.

“We won’t wait until an economic downturn”, he told a crowd of 3,000 party members in Vienna.
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Thousands of black men and women who believe Jesus Christ is returning soon to kill or enslave white people, Jews, homosexuals and others have joined the racist fringe of the black Hebrew Israelite movement, according to the latest issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, released today.

These black supremacist groups are growing more visible and militant, partly due to a magnetic young leader. In recent years, the movement, previously concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods on the East Coast, has spread to cities in Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Oregon.

“These groups have used bizarre interpretations of the Bible to justify their racist beliefs in much the same way that white supremacist groups have,” said Mark Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report, a quarterly investigative journal that monitors the radical right and racial extremism. “What is most worrying is that their talk has grown increasingly militant in recent years, with predictions of a bloody demise for white people and a whole host of other enemies.”

Most black Hebrew Israelites, while seeing themselves as the descendants of the Hebrews of the Bible, are neither explicitly racist nor anti-Semitic and do not advocate violence. However, videos posted on the Internet show preachers from the extremist fringe of the movement engaging in what one former adherent describes as “evangelical terrorizing” — a form of street preaching that involves verbally violent confrontations with whites and Jews. “Every white person who doesn’t get killed by Christ when he returns is going into slavery!” General Mayakaahla Ka, an Israelite School of Universal Practical Knowledge preacher, says in one video.
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When Weissport Councilman Tommy McEvilly came up with the theme for this weekend’s festival, he was shooting for something different and fun that could raise money for his cash-poor borough of 434 people.

He never thought his Redneck Festival would strike the kind of nerve that ripples right to the heart of this year’s presidential election.

Race.

A day after Bethlehem’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People president, Esther Lee, condemned the festival theme as racially insensitive, the event drew thousands and went off without a hitch, albeit while drawing the kind of attention McEvilly never intended.

Angry Obama supporters were asked to contact WGN’s 720 Extension radio talk show en masse to encourage the station to drop an interview with Stanley Kurtz, a National Review Online contributor with new information on Barack Obama. The show went on.

No secret now, why the Obama Campaign is desperately trying to silence National Review Online’s Stanley Kurtz.

Milt Rosenberg’s two-hour interview on WGN Radio last night with Kurtz revealed some of the agenda behind a late 1990’s Chicago public school program, of which Barack Obama was at the helm.

When news of the pending interview broke, the Obama campaign sent out emails, detailing talking points, and asking supporters to flood the radio station with calls and email messages, which they did. (The Obama Wire email appears at the end of this article.)

The Obama campaign was offered to participate in the entire two hour interview. According to Rosenberg’s producer, after the offer was made, a high-level Obama staffer asked for the name of the station manager and then hung up on the producer.
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In the midst of the Democrat National Convention in Denver, Colorado, Democrat Congressman Luis Gutierrez urged immigrants to join him in supporting Barack Obama in the upcoming presidential election.

While the representative from Illinois did not come out and tell illegal and legal immigrants to vote for Obama, it’s difficult to see how immigrants can help Obama except by voting for him. And most states do little, if anything, to prevent voter fraud.

“If you want change, it is time for Latinos and for immigrants to rally behind the next President of the United States, Barack Obama. Tonight, I ask my friends in the Latino community, in the immigrant community, please join me, because Barack Obama is the change we need,” said Rep. Gutierrez

“[W]hen Barack Obama occupies the White House, that is the community our president will defend and respect by fighting for comprehensive immigration reform.”
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“Cut short by Cortés, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way.”

So, the Aztecs were a sophisticated bunch of natural philosophers who were great lovers of food and had good health care. They were presumably at the brink of developing microwave popcorn, interplanetary travel and laser eye surgery when the Europeans showed up and invented racism and global warming.

It is undoubtedly true that there were brutal aspects of early modern European culture. It was a brutal age. However, whatever Europeans did at this time, they didn’t eat other people’s internal organs on a regular basis. I know of indications that human sacrifice was once practiced in Europe, China, Egypt and elsewhere, but that was in very ancient times. By the sixteenth century AD, human sacrifice was not an established feature among any of the major Old World civilizations, but it was quite common among New World peoples.
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This week a television report about how the voters in the Appalachia region of the US could be crucial in swinging the US presidential election threw out some interesting facts. One of them dental.

The levels of poverty remain so acute in this area which touches on 13 states that many people (rednecks, hillbillies, call them what you will) cannot afford even basic dental care. The report began with a dentist (volunteer) cheerfully wending his way through the gummy horror of one local’s mouth. Nine extractions was his verdict. Reconstructive dentistry obviously is way beyond the means of most.

But the man with the Deliverance smile is one of over 20 million people who could put the bite on the big beasts of US politics come November.

According to the report that’s because, whether the poor white folks of Appalachia know it themselves or even accept it, they mostly belong to a defined ethnic group.
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After failing to offer any restitution, Ralph Cucciniello, 56, Friday was sentenced to 30 years, suspended after 20 served, for ripping off $500,000 from more than 60 immigrants who believed he was getting them “green cards” to normalize their status in the U.S.

Superior Court Judge Richard Damiani, after reading numerous letters from Cucciniello’s victims, said, “I have concluded that Mr. Cucciniello’s entire life was a fraud … he is an evil man.”

Cucciniello, who falsely claimed to be a lawyer running an immigration clinic at Yale Law School, had access to the facility because of his relationship with Yale Professor Steven Duke.
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The University of Victoria is including “de-gendered” washrooms in all its new buildings for the comfort and safety of transgender students. Simon Fraser University juggles room bookings for Muslim students whose prayer times follow the sun, and the University of Calgary is launching an “equity audit” this fall to identify undersupported groups on campus.

At Carleton University and the University of Western Ontario, the official calendar listing holy days when students can be excused from classes or exams includes those central to Wicca and Zoroastrianism, an ancient religion that originated in Iran and is now estimated to have about 200,000 members worldwide.

Immigration, swelling numbers of international students and a shift in the population attending university means Canadian campuses are set to welcome a more diverse group of staff and students this fall than ever before. Many are abandoning a one-size-fits-all approach to their facilities and services as a result.
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