NPI Blog: News and Commentary

KARACHI - Growing ethnic violence is gripping the City which is creating panic among the citizens.

Rumours and warning threats to people to leave their houses, teashops, incidents of torture and blazing of pushcarts/shops have been created panic among the Karachiites.

Gossips spread across the City that Pushtoon have planned to blow up the water supply line and will also devise a strategy to halt the supply line of basic commodities from rest of the country.

Residents of various areas where ethnic rivalry is strengthening include North Nazimabad, North Karachi, Orangi Town, Baldia Town, Quaidabad, Liaquatabad and number of other areas.

Residents of the Chappell Apartment, Gulshan View, A-One Apartment, Phase 1, 2 and Iqra City situated at Abul Hassan Isphahani Road, Sohrab Goth have been suffering due to rising political tension.
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Last week the Secretary of State for Communities, Hazel Blears, spoke out, claiming that white working class voters turn to the BNP because they feel ignored by mainstream political parties.

Hazel Blears suggested that for many people politics is often a “closed world” far removed from their everyday existence, and that politicians need to be addressing the “bread and butter” issues which really matter to typical voters. She recognises that where the BNP wins votes it is often a result of local political failure in places where estates are often ignored for decades and votes are taken for granted, leading people to look elsewhere for answers.

In the current political climate, with the ongoing problems of the economy, the health service, the fight against terror and attitudes towards immigration, increased dissatisfaction with the government and political parties in general is clear. Many people feel that there is simply nobody in the mainstream parties representing their interests. This as a result has been clearly illustrated by increasing voter apathy. The feeling that the mainstream parties are failing the population is reflected in the presence of former Liberal Democrat, Labour and Conservative party members on the leaked list. Whilst the mainstream parties are doing little to address the growing grievances of ordinary voters, the British National Party is taking the opportunity to exploit genuine concerns in order to gain increased popular support.

Under Nick Griffin’s leadership the BNP have made an effort to distance itself from its overtly racist past in an attempt to make the party more acceptable to a wider range of people, including those who would not consider themselves as racist. By focusing campaigning on areas with racial tensions the BNP has been able to develop support in a small number of specific areas such as Leicester and East London, and now has 56 local councillors across Britain.
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White parents are less likely to take an interest in their children’s education than black or Asian parents. And they are also more likely to believe that their children’s schooling should be left up to their teachers, according to a study for the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

Their lack of involvement is likely to hamper their children’s chances of exam success later in life, it says, adding that black parents are more than twice as likely to say they are very involved in their children’s education than whites. Black and Asian parents say education is “very important to combat racial discrimination and disadvantage”.

It also showed that Chinese and Asian youths consistently outperformed white pupils in maths and English national curriculum tests. The research comes after the Rowntree Foundation found that white working-class pupils made the least progress throughout their schooling.
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This serial essay started with the assumption that Barack Hussein Obama’s election as the 44th President of the United States would accelerate the creation of a multicultural supra-state encompassing all the countries founded and developed by whites. This entity, that I called Meccania, would be an ideological extension of the European Union, suppressing and diluting its white majority, its original civilization and its civic freedoms while force-flooding its territories with ever more black, brown and Muslim minorities, and increasing state control over all areas of life.

A week after Mr. Obama’s election, it was impossible to exaggerate its impact on the world. That oxen had been slain for feasts in Kenya, and black Americans had cried for joy is fair and normal. But what the descendants of Europa were doing was unique, fascinating and terrible. They were dancing on their own grave in euphoric rapture, by the hundred millions, celebrating their own demise.

There were the leading airheads. For Gordon Brown, “America stands at its own dawn of hope” and St. Obama is about to usher a new age of “progressive multilateralism.” For Madame Sarkozy, the election of Obama was a fount of “immense joy” and hope that the “Obama effect” would reshape French society. For America’s “conservative” President Bush, Obama’s win was ‘good for our country’.
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The Indian government and news media have claimed that British-born Islamists are amongst the terrorists who have struck in Mumbai, leaving at least 130 dead and hundreds wounded.

Indian news channel NDTV reported that “British citizens of Pakistani origin” were among the attackers.

Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee has publicly blamed elements in Pakistan for the series of co-ordinated attacks.

“According to preliminary information, some elements in Pakistan are responsible,” he said.

It was the first time the Indian government had specifically named Pakistan as having a role in the attacks. Officials had previously talked of the militant gunmen coming from “outside the country.”

Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Mumbai, was reported to have said that two British-born Pakistanis were among eight gunmen seized by Indian commandos who stormed buildings to free hostages.
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Barack Obama and George W. Bush seem to have come away from their study of the Great Depression with similar conclusions:

To wit: After the Crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve did not move fast enough to save the banks and inject cash into the economy. Second, the New Deal, far from being wastrel deficit spending, was not bold enough. So it was that America wallowed in depression for a decade until the unbridled spending and mammoth deficits of World War II pulled us out.

Bush and Obama seem determined not to make the same mistake.

We are all Keynesians now.

Thus, we have the $700 billion Bush bank bailout, the $700 billion “stimulus package” Obama wants by inauguration to “jolt this economy back into shape” and the $800 billion fund Hank Paulson created to get consumers borrowing and buying again.

These come on top of Bush $455 billion deficit, the $29 billion bailout of Bear Stearns, the $105 billion in pork to grease the $700 billion bailout, the $100 billion to $200 billion to keep Fannie and Freddie afloat, the $140-billion-and-counting for AIG, the $25 billion for the greening of GM, Ford and Chrysler, the $25 billion more to save the Big Three and the $20 billion for CitiGroup.

Now much of this overlaps, and some will be retrieved. But we are still staring at a deficit that could approach $2 trillion.

How would this stack up historically?
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PREDICTIONS are often more useful for what they say about the predictor’s state of mind than for what they tell you about the future. That’s certainly the case with the US National Intelligence Council’s latest peer into the crystal ball — Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World — neatly timed to coincide with president-elect Barack Obama’s transition to the White House.

The report, the fourth in a five-yearly series, has a decidedly chastened tone as it sets out in broad strokes the US intelligence community’s latest consensus on what the world will look like 16 years hence.

The previous edition spoke confidently of the US “remaining the single most powerful actor, economically, technologically, militarily” in 2020. Doubt has now crept in: America will be “less dominant” in 2025, with the likely implication that “shrinking economic and military capabilities may force the US into a difficult set of trade-offs between domestic versus foreign policy priorities”.
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The festive season has come early this year - well for the robbers it has. For the rest of us there isn’t a great deal to celebrate.

Here, long-suffering South Africans call the annual spike in robbery “Christmas Shopping”. This year the stockings of criminals are overflowing and it is not even December.

Against a background of political turmoil, after a bitter split in the ruling African National Congress (ANC), the number of house break-ins, robberies and muggings is even higher than usual.

Unfortunately, I’ve had first-hand experience of the Christmas rush, SA-style. This year, among the most sought-after “gifts” are laptops - something of a professional necessity for a journalist.

My first one went about a month ago when thieves took advantage of our neighbours’ lax security - lax by this country’s standards that is. They have high walls and powerful spotlights, but had chosen not to put spikes or electric fences on the top. Young and perhaps naive, they have even forgone external beams linked to an alarm system.

This is child’s play for the young bargain-hunters. With a skip and a jump they were over, and the Africa office of The Times, separated from the garden by a low wall, must have looked like a rich kid’s Christmas tree - stuffed with laptop, satellite and mobile phones, cameras and all sorts of digital goodies.
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The time was June 2000. Scientists with the Celera Genomics Corporation, in conjunction with the international Human Genome Project, announced that they had successfully derived the entire sequence of the human genome. Furthermore, they noted that humans share 99.9% of their genetic code with one another. This discovery served as the platform for the medical community to declare that there was no genetic foundation for the notion of race, and we were all just human beings.

The problem with this assertion is that the human genome is comprised of over 3 billion base pairs. Therefore, a 0.1% difference between individuals amounts to 3 million base pairs. A mutation in a single base pair can mean the difference between having a disease and not having a disease, as in the case of thalassemia, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, or hemophilia. One can easily see that 3 million is far from insignificant in terms of differentiating who we are. If nuclear families are closely related genetically, and are more prone to certain diseases, why wouldn’t groups of people with common ancestral lines share this same propensity?
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The San Diego Minutemen has pulled two Latino lawmakers into its legal clash with the California Department of Transportation, alleging they were part of a conspiracy to keep the anti-illegal immigration group out of the state’s Adopt-A-Highway cleanup program.

Federal Judge William Hayes approved the Minutemen’s request Monday to add Assemblyman Joe Coto, D-San Jose, and state Sen. Gilbert Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, as defendants in the free-speech lawsuit.

The Minutemen also will be allowed to seek punitive damages, Hayes said in a written order.

Coto and Cedillo are leaders of the state Latino Legislative Caucus. They did not return calls Tuesday.

The Minutemen sued Caltrans and its top officials in February after the agency revoked its permit to pick up trash along a two-mile stretch of Interstate 5, near the U.S. Border Patrol’s San Clemente checkpoint.