The strangest story of the day concerns the purchase of commercial time on Pakistani TV by the British government to target young vulnerable Muslims with messages that will help them turn away from terrorism.The Pakistan operation is a pilot program. If it has a positive effect, then similar initiatives will be launched in Yemen, Egypt, and other Muslim countries whose young men are at risk.
Thanks to C. Cantoni, Gaia, Insubria, JD, TB, Tuan Jim, VH, Vlad Tepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in. Headlines and articles are below the fold.
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Bruised Obama to Tour America in Bid to Sell $800bn Rescue Deal
Razor-thin victory over stimulus package gives the president new room for manoeuvre in the face of an increasingly hostile opposition
[Comment from JD: “Roll, up, rollup…I have here Dr.SnakeOils unique tonic. Guaranteed to cure all manner of ills…” blah, blah, blah.]
Fresh from a nail-biting triumph with his economic stimulus package, Barack Obama will head to the American heartland tomorrow in an attempt to win public support for his massive rescue bill.
Adopting the no-holds-barred tactics honed during his election campaign, the president is to hold “town hall” meetings in Indiana and Florida, speaking in towns hit hard by rising unemployment. The publicity blitz is aimed at persuading Americans that government help will get them out of their economic mess.
It is not an easy sell. Obama’s trip comes after winning the first major battle of his presidency in getting the support of just enough Republicans to ensure his $800bn stimulus is passed in the Senate. The victory, however, was narrow and came after a bitter political fight that revealed fault lines in Washington that are echoed across America.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
‘Buy American’ — or Bye-Bye America
For the stimulus bills of both Houses have a “Buy American” provision mandating that in “public works” only U.S. iron, steel and manufactures be used. The provision came out of the appropriations committee of the House on a 55-to-0 vote.
The Senate watered it down by declaring the Buy American provision must be consistent with all U.S. trade commitments. But Congress is sending a message: The rebuilding of America is to be a project of, by and for Americans, not outsourced. Sen. McCain’s free-trade amendment, to strip all Buy American provisions from the bill, was routed 65 to 31
The reaction of Barack Obama, a NAFTA skeptic in 2008 with bumper stickers that read, “Buy American, Vote Obama,” was to genuflect to the gods of globalism and recant his economic patriotism.
“I think it would be a mistake … at a time when worldwide trade is declining, for the United States to start sending a message that somehow we’re just looking out after ourselves,” he told Fox News. We don’t want to “trigger a trade war,” he told ABC.
Apparently, Obama was unnerved by rumbles from Europe, which is threatening to drag us before a World Trade Organization tribunal and have “Buy American” banished forever.
But there is no easy way out now for a Democratic Party where economic nationalism is rampant. If Congress drops or Obama refuses to enforce the Buy American provision, and billions of stimulus dollars are spent on foreign iron, steel and cement, Middle America will know whom to blame. But if Americans get the contracts, and Europeans get nothing, Europe will have to decide whether to retaliate and start a trade war with a populist and nationalist America.
We may be at a turning point in history. For we are about to choose whether to fully and finally cast our lot with globalism, or to become again a nation and people who put Americans first.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Communism Scheduled for a Vote in Senate
Last week I wrote about the Socialist spending bill filled with partisan political paybacks not so cleverly disguised as “stimulus.” And now those in the Senate who represent you are negotiating not the concept of spending our way out of debt, but rather, how much and who — besides ACORN, leading the nation in voter fraud — will be the beneficiary of billions of your hard-earned tax dollars.
I called this bill Socialist. Newsweek says we’re now Socialists. Turns out we were both wrong. Sam Webb, the leader of the Communist Party USA is doing Communist cartwheels because he believes that it’s his Communist agenda that’s being embraced. Speaking in Ohio for People’s Weekly World Communist newspaper, Webb said: “We now have not simply a friend, but a people’s advocate in the White House.”
The leader of the Communist Party USA may not be the only one doing Communist cartwheels. Brace yourself for what I’m about to say next. Last fall, prior to the presidential election, a friend of mine, Dr. Wiley Drake, former second vice president for the Southern Baptist Convention, sent me an e-mail on which I didn’t report. It just seemed too extreme. It was from a software developer he met named Tom Fife who told of how he first heard of the name “Barack.”
I can’t prove whether it’s true or not, but in light of all that is happening, it just doesn’t seem that far-fetched anymore. All I know is that Tom Fife is a real guy — not some e-mail scam. I’ve talked to him. He was a government contractor with an active security clearance who took notes on his trips for debriefings with the Defense Intelligence Agency within the Department of Defense. This is what he wrote down after it happened in 1992, before anyone ever heard the name “Barack”: […]
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
General Motors to Invest $1 Billion in Brazil Operations — Money to Come From U.S. Rescue Program
SAO PAULO — General Motors plans to invest $1 billion in Brazil to avoid the kind of problems the U.S. automaker is facing in its home market, said the beleaguered car maker.
According to the president of GM Brazil-Mercosur, Jaime Ardila, the funding will come from the package of financial aid that the manufacturer will receive from the U.S. government and will be used to “complete the renovation of the line of products up to 2012.”
“It wouldn’t be logical to withdraw the investment from where we’re growing, and our goal is to protect investments in emerging markets,” he said in a statement published by the business daily Gazeta Mercantil.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Laid Off? Go Home, Says Czech Republic
PRAGUE — The Czech Republic will offer a free plane ticket and €500 ($795) to foreign workers who voluntarily agree to return home after losing their jobs in the economic downturn, the government said on Monday.
The sweeteners are among measures to cope with security risks stemming from rising unemployment among foreign workers in the EU member country, Interior Minister Ivan Langer said.
In the past years, the fast-growing Czech economy, led by the car industry, lured cheap labour mainly from Ukraine, Slovakia, Vietnam, Mongolia and Moldova.
Mr. Langer said many unemployed foreigners lacked cash to pay for a ticket home, as they had been saving to pay excessive fees or bribes — up to $14,500 — to agencies that secured them jobs in the Czech Republic.
“Many of these people could unfortunately end up with a difficult financial problem and struggle for a living. Then there is a threat that they will end up in a grey zone and become a part of criminal networks,” Mr. Langer said.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
President and Congress Grovel Before the Fed
“‘We’ve seen money go out the back door of this government unlike any time in the history of our country,’ Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, said on the Senate floor Feb. 3. ‘Nobody knows what went out of the Federal Reserve Board, to whom and for what purpose. How much from the FDIC? How much from TARP? When? Why?’“
Senator Dorgan is exactly right. No one oversees the Fed. The Fed is held accountable to absolutely nobody. But Senator Dorgan (as with everyone else in Congress) has no one to blame but himself. Ever since the Marxist, E. Mandell House, convinced President Woodrow Wilson to create the Federal Reserve in 1913, the Congress of the United States has had virtually nothing to do with the way our fiscal policies are managed. The Fed (which is not even a government agency, but rather a private corporation consisting of mostly foreign bankers) dictates America’s financial policies.
[…]
Yet, the U.S. Constitution, in Article. I. Section. 8. Paragraph. 5., clearly gives Congress the authority “To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures.”
This constitutional requirement makes two obvious demands: 1) only the elected Congress, not some private foreign (or even domestic) banking interest, has the power to make monetary policy, 2) U.S. currency must be hard currency, i.e. gold and silver. Paper money—known as the Federal Reserve Notes—is not even legal tender under the U.S. Constitution.
In truth, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is itself unconstitutional. In simple terms, the Act did not amend or expunge Article. I. Section. 8. Paragraph. 5. of the Constitution; it merely ignored it. (And Congresses and Presidents have been ignoring the Constitution ever since.)
In fact, Article. I. Section. 10. Paragraph 1. of the U.S. Constitution specifically states, “No State shall . . . coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Stimulus Bill Funds ACORN Despite Its History of Corruption
KEY DATA:
* ACORN could receive up to $4 billion under the economic stimulus legislation approved by the House of Representatives. * ACORN has received an estimated $53 million in government funds since its founding in 1970. * ACORN is under investigation in at least 14 states in connection with allegations of voter registration fraud in the 2008 campaign.
TAKE HOME:
ACORN claims to represent low-income workers but does not pay its own employees the minimum wage and in 1995 sued California for an exemption from its minimum wage requirement.
A multi-million dollar liberal non-profit activist conglomerate reportedly under federal investigation may get a big piece of the economic recovery stimulus pie now under consideration by Congress. It’s the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — the infamous ACORN.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Stimulus Contains Rationed Medicine
‘Safe, effective’ treatments soon to be limited by ‘cost’
The former lieutenant governor of New York is warning that the $50 billion that President Obama expects to spend in the next few years on a nationwide digital health records system for every individual easily could, and probably will, result in rationed medical care.
They said patients might be startled to discover documentation on abortions, mental health problems, impotence, being labeled as a non-compliant patient, lawsuits against doctors and sexual problems could be shared electronically with, perhaps, millions of people.
Sue A. Blevins, president of the Institute for Health Freedom, said unless people have the right to decide “if and when” their health information is shared, there is no real privacy.
[…]
“If the Obama administration’s economic stimulus bill passes … in its current form, seniors in the U.S. will face … rationing. Defenders of the system say that individuals benefit in younger years and sacrifice later.”
[…]
McCaughey noted Daschle has discussed such plans, modeled after the United Kingdom, in his writings, and a national board to make necessary decisions.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Labour’s Recession Woes Deepen as Balls Warns Economic Crisis is Worst for 100 Years
The Tories have seized on an admission from Ed Balls that Britain was facing the worst global downturn for “more than 100 years”.
With a new opinion poll giving the Conservatives a huge lead, Downing Street scrambled to limit the damage from Mr Balls’s claim that the impact of the financial crisis could last another 15 years.
Shadow chancellor George Osborne stepped up the attack as his party pounced on Mr Balls’s admission that the banking crisis had erupted in part because the UK’s financial regulation “wasn’t tough enough” in recent years.
[…]
He also raised fears that the downturn could spark a Thirties-style resurgence of the far-Right.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Millions for Charities Hit by Recession
£40m government aid contrasts with £500bn to bail out banks
Ministers will today announce a £40m bailout for charities dealing with the effects of the recession, but the lifeline is a fraction of the sum the government was urged to provide at crisis talks last year.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
US Treasury ‘Overpaid’ $78bn in Bank Bailout
The US Government overpaid $78 billion last year for stakes in troubled banks as part of its $700 billion bailout, the Congressional panel overseeing the rescue said.
The panel’s criticism came as the Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, prepared to unveil on Monday the White House’s latest plan for strengthening the financial system.
The Congressional Oversight Panel, set up in October last year to monitor the Government’s use of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp), said that the Treasury had paid $254 billion in 2008 for shares in banks including Citigroup but got only $176 billion in value.
The calculations were included in a report released today by the panel.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Vince Cable: ‘Bring Back the Guillotine…for Bankers’
The City bankers who ruined their banks but have been kept in employment by the taxpayer now demand we pay them their bonuses to maintain the aristocratic lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. They know no shame and take no blame. They are lucky the British have no guillotines in stock.
Is the public outrage simply the politics of envy? I think not. Most of us have no problem with successful entrepreneurs earning lots of money. They rightly command respect, as the backbone of a healthy, private enterprise system.
The bonus-hunting bankers, by contrast, stand charged with destroying wealth on an epic scale. Foolish, greedy, irresponsible behaviour and excessive risk-taking led to massive losses and the crisis in the banking system which is now costing millions their jobs and many their homes. Why should such failure be rewarded?
[…]
Britain will continue to need bright, enterprising people and to reward success. But the unfettered greed, and rewards for stupidity and failure which have been exposed in the City, leave a very bad taste in everyone’s mouth. The financial aristocracy has to learn to respect the public who pay their wages. Otherwise we shall soon be importing French guillotines.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
We Are All Socialists Now
In many ways our economy already resembles a European one. As boomers age and spending grows, we will become even more French.
The interview was nearly over. on the Fox News Channel last Wednesday evening, Sean Hannity was coming to the end of a segment with Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, the chair of the House Republican Conference and a vociferous foe of President Obama’s nearly $1 trillion stimulus bill. How, Pence had asked rhetorically, was $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts going to put people back to work in Indiana? How would $20 million for “fish passage barriers” (a provision to pay for the removal of barriers in rivers and streams so that fish could migrate freely) help create jobs? Hannity could not have agreed more. “It is … the European Socialist Act of 2009,” the host said, signing off. “We’re counting on you to stop it. Thank you, congressman.”
There it was, just before the commercial: the S word, a favorite among conservatives since John McCain began using it during the presidential campaign. (Remember Joe the Plumber? Sadly, so do we.) But it seems strangely beside the point. The U.S. government has already—under a conservative Republican administration—effectively nationalized the banking and mortgage industries. That seems a stronger sign of socialism than $50 million for art. Whether we want to admit it or not—and many, especially Congressman Pence and Hannity, do not—the America of 2009 is moving toward a modern European state.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Obama Reverses Bush Policy on ‘Warming’
Federal agencies settle long-standing case in favor of environmentalists
NEW YORK — Reflecting the Obama administration’s embrace of government policies that enforce a politically charged climate-change agenda, two federal agencies settled a six-year lawsuit, agreeing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting renewable energy standards in energy-poor countries and to establish new carbon emission standards applicable to future development projects the two agencies fund.
The sudden decision by the Obama administration to settle the “global warming” cases marks a dramatic reversal of the Bush administration’s determination to fight the case in federal court. The cases were first filed by a host of environmental groups and four typically activist cities allied with their efforts.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Plague-Infested Mice Missing From New Jersey Research Lab
Miami, FL (AHN) — The frozen remains of two mice infected with the bubonic plague are missing from a New Jersey bioterror research facility, and the facility waited seven weeks to report the incident to federal and state authorities.
Officials with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, where the remains went missing, and FBI officials, said the missing mice pose no public health threat.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
The Suicide of the GOP
You can’t say I didn’t warn them.
You can’t say I didn’t explain the opportunity before them.
You can’t say I didn’t tell them just what they could do to take back the Congress as soon as 2010.
But it doesn’t appear the Republicans will heed the call.
They are being seduced — one by one — by President Obama and the Democratic leadership. They are being co-opted — not all of them, of course, but just enough to spread the blame for what is the inevitable failure of Democratic policies, particularly on the economy.
The latest is Judd Gregg, Republican senator from New Hampshire, who has agreed to be Obama’s commerce secretary.
This is a guy, by the way, who was previously on record as supporting the abolition of the Commerce Department. And that, of course, would be the right thing to do. We should abolish the Commerce Department and most of the other departments operating unconstitutionally in America today.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
U.S. Judges Seek Massive California Prisoner Release
[Comment from Tuan Jim: You know, if they want to let everyone in jail for drug possession (not intent to sell) out — cool — but they’d better not start dropping violent convicts on the streets.]
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — Federal judges on Monday tentatively ordered California to release tens of thousands of inmates, up to a third of all prisoners, in the next three years to stop dangerous overcrowding.
As many as 57,000 could be let go if the current population were cut by the maximum percentage considered by a three-judge panel. Judges said the move could be done without threatening public safety — and might improve a public safety hazard.
The state immediately said it would appeal the final ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Trend-setting California, the Golden State, has an immense prison system responsible for nearly 170,000 inmates, and their care has become a major political and budget issue as officials weigh multibillion costs of improved facilities against death and illness behind bars.
State officials say new doctors, nurses and prison rules have improved care and cut the dangers of living behind bars.
Meanwhile California is staggering through budget crisis as its real estate market has collapsed and unemployment has spiked.
The three judges specifically said they planned to order the system, swollen to about double its capacity last year, to cut down to 120 percent to 145 percent of capacity within two to three years. They did not give a target headcount.
APPEAL VOWED
California already houses some inmates out of state. Its main in-state prisons and camps had more than 157,000 prisoners, or 188 percent of capacity, as of the end of January, according to state figures, and a cut to 120 percent of capacity would mean letting go about 57,000 prisoners.
“They’ve told the state, ‘You’re going to lose,’“ said Alison Hardy, a lawyer with Berkeley, California-based Prison Law Office, which with other attorneys represented plaintiffs who had sued the state over overcrowding in its prisons.
Attorney General Jerry Brown, the former governor, said he would appeal the final ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“This order, the latest intrusion by the federal judiciary into California’s prison system, is a blunt instrument that does not recognize the imperatives of public safety, nor the challenges of incarcerating criminals, many of whom are deeply disturbed,” he said in a statement.
“There is no doubt that there is room for improvement. But significant progress has been made and is continuing to be made at a cost of billions,” he added.
The three judges made the tentative ruling in a bid to get the opposing sides to work together, and they offered a court-appointed settlement referee to aid in discussions.
They did not say when the final ruling would be made but were clear that they considered the system still in trouble despite progress, with inadequate medical facilities and prisoners three to a cell, increasing spread of disease.
“There is no relief other than a prisoner release order that can remedy the constitutionally inadequate medical and mental health care,” the panel led by Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt, wrote.
“The state has a number of options, including reform of the earned credit and parole systems, that would serve to reduce the population of the prison to whatever percentage is ultimately determined to be appropriate without adversely affecting public safety,” the judges wrote.
The panel ordered the state to consult with the prisoners’ lawyers to consider what actions to take.
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
U.S. Senator Seeks Bush-Era “Truth Commission”
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — A U.S. “truth commission” should investigate Bush administration policies including the promotion of war in Iraq, detainee treatment and wiretapping without a warrant, an influential senator proposed on Monday.
Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, urged a commission as a way to heal what he called sharp political divides under former President George W. Bush and to prevent future abuses.
He compared it to other truth commissions, such as one in South Africa that investigated the apartheid era.
“We need to come to a shared understanding of the failures of the recent past,” Leahy said in a speech at Georgetown University.
“Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened,” the Vermont senator said. “And we do that to make sure it never happens again.”
Some Republicans and intelligence officials have resisted any suggestion of broad inquiries into accusations against the Bush administration, saying it would be a distraction or weaken morale in the fight against terrorism.
“If every administration started to re-examine what every prior administration did, there would be no end to it. This is not Latin America,” the Judiciary committee’s top-ranking Republican, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, told reporters last month.
President Barack Obama, who suggested shortly before he took office in January that he did not favor prosecuting Bush administration officials over their counterterrorism policies, said on Monday his administration would seek to uphold “our traditions of rule of law and due process.”
“Nobody’s above the law and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing … people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen,” Obama told a news conference, his first since taking office.
“I will take a look at Senator Leahy’s proposal … but my general orientation is to say let’s get it right moving forward,” he said.
Bush spokesman Rob Saliterman said only, “We’re not going to respond to every call for more investigations.”
Leahy said he had not begun to promote the truth commission idea with the Obama administration or with the Democratic- controlled Congress. But he suggested it could be formed by both Congress and the White House, and said the panel must have credibility across the political spectrum.
Issues to investigate would include the Justice Department’s firings of several U.S. attorneys, which Leahy said may have been motivated by a White House aim to influence elections, policies on the treatment of terrorism suspects and other areas “where (congressional) committees were lied to.”
That included the war in Iraq, he said. “There were lies told to the American people all the way through.”
Bush has acknowledged that intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was wrong, but said he never lied to the public about the war.
Leahy said he wanted the Defense Department investigated for filming Iraq-war protesters, which he said came “shockingly close” to the FBI’s Vietnam War-era Cointelpro operation to investigate domestic war protesters. “We fought a revolution in this country so we could protest the actions of our government,” he said.
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
A Lesson for Schools in Surrey and Ottawa — Aggression Works
In a story out of Surrey, England February 6th, an angry headteacher is suing “gutless” education honchos for 100,000 pounds because they failed to support her against Muslim school bullies. The bullies were not children in the school yard, but a group of Muslim governors, appointed in 2003, that plaintiff Erica Connor claims took control of regular board meetings and pushed for a more religious agenda, including pressure on her to link up with the local mosque in order to focus on Muslim worship. When she resisted, she was labelled “racist and Islamophobic.” Rather than support her, her superiors branded her as “unresponsive to the needs of the faith community.” Connor says she is so depressed at having been made a “helpless scapegoat,” she may never work again.
Sadly, what seems to be a hijacking of a supposedly secular public school system by religious extremists has become a commonplace in Britain and Europe. The all too common response to the arrogance and aggression of Muslim exceptionalism in public institutions, most consequentially in schools, has been appeasement, and a disgraceful acquiescence to the kind of scapegoatism this teacher alleges.
Most Canadians probably believe that sort of thing can’t happen here. And yet when I read this story, I was immediately reminded, with something of a chill, of an eerily similar narrative I had read concerning a school in our nation’s capital. The details were different, but the basic problem — school officials backing down in the face of Muslim aggression against a teacher, and a subsequent acquiescence in the teacher’s victimization in order to avoid confrontation with religious expansionism — were the same…
| — Hat tip: Vlad Tepes | [Return to headlines] |
When Dealing With Punks, There’s No Time to be a Liberal
In Toronto, on Thursday, I witnessed a little incident of some value to the interpretation of world affairs. It happened on a crowded westbound King Street trolley, trapped at Yonge Street by the early rush hour crowds. (Ottawans may envy any kind of functioning transit service.)
Three young men, whom one might characterize as voluntary members of the underclass from the way they were dressed (expensive ghetto gear), jumped the back door of the trolley, in order to avoid paying fares. It is the sort of thing people just get used to in a decaying society. The drivers have their hands full processing paying customers through the front entrance, and can hardly be expected to guard the rear.
But in this case, the driver more than noticed what was happening, apparently through his rear-view mirror. He shut the front doors, stalled the car, and elbowed his way through the standing passengers to confront his unpaid guests. “I’ve got bad news for you punks,” he declared, loudly. “I am not a liberal.” Upon being told this, they left the car peacefully. Though I should add that, this being Toronto, the passengers looked more astounded by the driver’s declaration than by the punks’ behaviour.
In my humble opinion — shared with all those with some elementary understanding of the art of policing — the leading cause of anti-social behaviour is permission. People, and young punks especially, will do things that even they know are malicious because no one will stop them.
The worst possible conditions exist, as today, when the surrounding society is befogged with idiotic, decadent notions, such as the idea that the punks are themselves “victims” of some material deprivation, when what they have in fact been deprived of is the iron fist of the law.
We see this phenomenon writ large in Gaza, where the punks are organized into a terrorist militia called Hamas. It is unnecessary to consider their Islamist ideological credentials, only to witness their deeds. These are people who were under the impression that “society” — by analogy “the world community,” and the diplomatic draughtsmen of innumerable “roadmaps to peace” — had granted them permission to wing thousands of rockets gratuitously into Israel.
And that world community is now the more astounded when Israel replies, in effect, “I am not a liberal,” than it ever was by the incessant pounding of the Qassams. We have the spectacle of the suits at the United Nations running about declaring truces that both Hamas and Israel will ignore. Hamas is still winging rockets; Israel has declared no intention of stopping until the rockets stop.
As Claudia Rosett, the leading journalistic investigator of UN perfidy, has been documenting for some years now (in her weekly Forbes.com column and elsewhere), the punks of Palestine have benefited from a level of permission that amounts to direct encouragement.
Since the complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (that was supposed to bring an enduring peace), Hamas has been able to consolidate its political power over the enclave, while consolidating Gaza’s economy around just two industries: terrorism and foreign aid. There is no other economy in Gaza, and there has been no credible attempt to build one.
The UN Relief and Works Agency has acted as the great enabler. Set up in 1949 as a temporary agency to house, feed and resettle fewer than one million Arab refugees (Israel received an approximately equal number of Jewish refugees from around the Arab world), UNRWA has grown by bureaucratic persistence into a vast, permanent welfare organization for the 4.6-million descendants of its original “client base” — and for their descendants, into the indefinite future. It provides for them with a staff and budget several times larger than the combined UN effort on behalf of all the other refugees on the planet.
That UNRWA does not operate in a vacuum, but has instead woven itself into the regional matrix, is evident from the history. The agency’s camps, which have grown into permanent settlements, are distributed not only through Gaza and the West Bank, but around Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Arab governments in each of these jurisdictions absolutely refuse to naturalize these permanent residents, almost all of whom were born on their soil, on the claim that they must rightfully be “returned” to the territory Israel now “occupies.” Thus UNRWA facilitates the use of these so-called “refugees” as a dagger pointed at Israel’s throat.
Moreover, almost all of UNRWA’s staff is locally recruited Palestinian, and thus the entire operation is open to subversion to the ends that they decree. For instance, this week, as the Israelis have alleged, the use of a UN school as an arms cache, use of the building as a defensive fortification by Hamas gunmen, use of its inmates as “human shields.”
There are root causes of the current conflict, going, as all agree, right back to the foundation of Israel (by the UN) in the late 1940s. The continued existence of UNRWA is the principal one, creating the conditions for Islamist terrorism to flourish, and it is time that root cause was addressed.
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
Czech Clerk Given Suspended Sentence for Fictitious Marriages
Kladno — The Kladno district court today imposed a three-year suspended sentence with a four-year probation on a Czech registrar who enabled fictitious marriages of foreigners who sought Czech citizenship.
The sentenced woman was banned from working for the state administration for four years.
The prosecutor proposed that the woman go to prison, but the court decided that her action was not so dangerous to society to send her behind bars.
Both the registrar and the prosecutor may appeal the verdict.
According to the prosecution, the registrar helped legalise the stay of some 50 foreigners, mostly Vietnamese, by fictitious marriages with Czech citizens in 2004-2005. Many of the foreigners did not have valid documents.
Testimonies showed that none of the couples whose marriages were checked by the court lived together.
The court has not proved that the registrar received money from the foreigners. She nevertheless clearly abused her power, the judge said.
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
Denmark: Arrests Made in Weapons Robbery Case
Police have arrested at least two men in connection with the robbery of arms from a Zealand military facility
Police have made a number of arrests in one of Denmark’s largest ever robberies of firearms. Almost 200 automatic rifles and semi-automatic pistols, together with ammunition, were stolen in a raid on a military base guardhouse in the southern Zealand town of Slagelse in January.
A man in his 40s was arrested in the Zealand town of Smørumnedre at the weekend and was remanded to custody for four weeks. Another man from the greater Copenhagen area was arrested yesterday and is currently appearing before a judge in a closed door session at Nææstved courthouse.
B.T. newspaper reports that an unknown number of other suspects have been remanded to custody in the case. It was the first time in the country’s history that a military facility had been robbed. During the weekend arrest, police recovered a number of the weapons, but said that at least 100 are still unaccounted for.
Sources told B.T. that some of the weapons, worth up to 50,000 kroner on the black market, have already found their way into the hands of those involved with biker gangs.
The base in Slagelse was guarded by three soldiers. But two were sleeping when the armed thieves stormed into the guardhouse forcing the third to open the locked room were the weapons were stored.
The guards later stated that the robbers spent about half an hour in the room, selecting what they wanted to take.
Some of the weapons stolen were due to be sent to Danish soldiers deployed in Afghanistan.
Fact file: Weapons stolen in raid
91 M96 rifles
44 M95 rifles
20 light machine guns
34 Neuhausen M49 pistols
Ancillary equipment:
3 loaded M95 magazines
12 grenade launchers for M95 rifles
23 light machine gun mounts
15 firing pins for recoilless rifles
14 heavy machine mounts
27 laser sights
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
Denmark: Police Raid Hells Angels Clubs
Copenhagen police have raided two Hells Angels strongholds in a search for weapons. Four people are reported to have been detained.
Police officers have raided two Hells Angels strongholds in Copenhagen in a search for weapons, according to Copenhagen Police Supt. Steffen Steffensen, who adds that his officers are searching for weapons.
“We’re seeing what we can find, we have dogs inside looking,” Supt. Steffensen says.
The two strongholds being searched are on Svanevej in Copenhagen and Lindgreens Allé in Amager.
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
Don’t Attack US Please, UK Ads to Say on Pak TV
Prominent British Muslims will star in the British Foreign Office-funded £400,000 campaign.London: The British Government will air ads on Pakistani television urging terrorists to not attack Britain.Prominent British Muslims will star in the British Foreign Office-funded £400,000 (approximately Rs 2.9 crore)-campaign that is set to break on Pakistani television next Monday, ‘The Guardian’ reported on Tuesday.The three-month public relations offensive, called ‘I Am the West’, will also include high-profile events in regions such as Peshawar and Mirpur, ‘The Guardian’ said. Seven in ten British Pakistanis are Mirpuris.According to ‘The Guardian’, the first three ads in the project will feature British Communities Minister Sadiq Khan, UK manager of Islamic Relief Jehangir Malik, former England Under-19 captain and promising Worcestershire allrounder Moeen Ali, and the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, Chaudry Abdul Rashid, a Mirpuri.The campaign, the paper said, will be targeted at ‘15-25-year-old males who are less than well-educated and worldly wise, but potentially susceptible to extremist doctrines’. Nine 30-second commercials, supported by ads on radio, will be aired on PTV, Geo TV and Khyber among other channels. If the Pakistani campaign is successful, it will be extended in Egypt, Yemen and Indonesia…
| — Hat tip: Gaia | [Return to headlines] |
Germany’s High Court Decides is the European Union Constitutional?
[Comment from Tuan Jim: I was totally unaware of Germany’s EU treaty status — very interesting.]
There are those in Germany who think the Lisbon Treaty transfers too much responsibility to Brussels. The Constitutional Court is hearing the case this week. Should it agree, then the treaty is dead.
As trivia questions go, it’s not an easy one: What four European Union countries have yet to ratify the Lisbon Treaty?
A couple of them are obvious. Ireland, of course, rejected the treaty in a referendum last June, but will likely give the document a second chance in a new poll. And the Czech Republic is no surprise either, given the country’s reputation as a Euro-skeptic. Even Poland might be clear given Warsaw’s tendency in the past to try and leverage as many last-second concessions as possible out of any EU agreement.
The fourth, though, is not so obvious. After all, the German parliament has already rubber-stamped the treaty and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has signed it.
But not all in Germany are in favor of the Treaty of Lisbon. There are some who worry that it violates the German constitution by exporting core governmental competencies from Berlin to Brussels. President Horst Köhler has withheld his approval of the treaty until the legal questions are clarified. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the German Constitutional Court will hear arguments in the case. And given the fundamental nature of the complaints involved, it is not at all clear that the justices will side with the EU. If they don’t, then the Treaty of Lisbon is dead…
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
Germany: Climate Change Paradox: Wind Turbines in Europe Do Nothing for Emissions-Reduction Goals
Despite Europe’s boom in solar and wind energy, CO2 emissions haven’t been reduced by even a single gram. Now, even the Green Party is taking a new look at the issue — as shown in e-mails obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE.
Germany’s renewable energy companies are a tremendous success story. Roughly 15 percent of the country’s electricity comes from solar, wind or biomass facilities, almost 250,000 jobs have been created and the net worth of the business is EURO 35 billion per year.
But there’s a catch: The climate hasn’t in fact profited from these developments. As astonishing as it may sound, the new wind turbines and solar cells haven’t prohibited the emission of even a single gram of CO2.
Even more surprising, the European Union’s own climate change policies, touted as the most progressive in the world, are to blame. The EU-wide emissions trading system determines the total amount of CO2 that can be emitted by power companies and industries. And this amount doesn’t change — no matter how many wind turbines are erected.
Experts have known about this situation for some time, but it still isn’t widely known to the public. Even Germany’s government officials mention it only under their breath. No one wants to discuss the political ramifications.
It’s a sensitive subject: Germany is recognized worldwide as a leader in all things related to renewable energy. The environmental energy sector doesn’t want this image to be tarnished. Under no circumstances does Berlin want the Renewable Energy Law (EEG) — which mandates the prices at which energy companies have to buy green power — to fall into disrepute.
At the same time, big energy companies have an interest in maintaining the status quo. As a result, no one is pushing for change. Everyone involved is remaining silent…
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Homeless Indian Burns Victim’s Relatives to Visit
Rome, 9 Feb. (AKI) — The grandmother and brother-in-law of a homeless Indian man who was burnt and beaten in a savage attack in central Italy will on Friday travel from India to visit him in the hospital, Punjabi businessman Singh Balaraj told Adnkronos International (AKI).
Navtej Singh Sidhu underwent his first skin graft last Friday after being admitted to Rome’s St Eugenio hospital with a fractured skull and burns to 40 percent of his body.
Sidhu, 35, a homeless and unemployed labourer, was attacked and set on fire by assailants as he slept on a station bench in the coastal town of Nettuno 70 kilometres south of Rome on 1 February. Three local youths aged between 16 and 29 have been charged with attempted murder over the attack, which happened around 4 am.
Italy’s Sikh community, the Lazio region and the Indian Embassy in Rome is paying for Sidhu’s grandmother, Taj Kaur, and his brother-in-law, Avtar Singh Gill to visit him, Balaraj told AKI.
The family is from a poor farming community in the northwest Indian state of Punjab’s Moga district. Both Sidhu’s parents are dead, as is his elder sister. Sidhu has been in Italy for five years, but became homeless because his permit of stay had expired and he lost his job four months ago.
One of the surgeons who performed the first skin graft on Sidhu’s legs and feet, Vito Verardi, told AKI on Monday “he is doing quite well.”
“This is the post-operative period. The operation was very tough for him. He was under surgical stress, lost blood and his blood pressure was very low,” Verardi stated.
“Sidhu is conscious, and is feeding himself with an endogastric tube. “He’s reacting well to this treatment, but still needs several operations, and he won’t be out of intensive care quickly,” Verardi said.
“But we have completed the worst operation. The next ones will be shorter and straightforward,” he said. “We are currently very optimistic,” he underlined.
In the following operations, the first of which could be carried out next week, skin grafted onto Sidhu from a skin bank will need to be replaced with his own skin from his arms and upper thighs, Verardi explained.
The attack against Sidhu has shocked immigrants and sparked condemnation from charities who work with them and from politicians.
Rome’s mayor, Gianni Alemanno has personally visited Sidhu in hospital and said on Italian television that he will ensure Sidhu has a proper job and accommodation when he gets out of hospital.
Other visitors to Sidhu’s bedside include Italy’s Senate speaker, Renato Schifani and India’s ambassador to Italy, Arif Khan.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Vigilante Patrols Could Have Prevented Rapes, Says Minister
Rome, 9 Feb. (AKI) — Several recent rapes in Italy could have been prevented, had the vigilante patrols approved last week by the Italian Senate already been in operation, according to interior minister Roberto Maroni. “If the patrols had been taking place, maybe the rapes would not have occurred,” said Maroni in a radio interview on Italy’s Radio24.
Maroni was referring to a spate of rapes allegedly perpetrated by immigrants in Italy.
Maroni said any volunteer vigilantes taking part in the patrols would not be armed. Such patrols have been operating informally for 10 years without a single episode of unjustified violence having taken place.
“The patrols are made up of unarmed volunteers who walk around with their mobile phone, playing an important in role in securing the country,” he said.
“The patrols have been around for ten years and there has never been involved in instances of violence,” he added, seeking to defuse fears of armed citizens patrolling the streets.
However, racial tension and attacks against immigrants are rising in Italy. On 1 February, a homeless Indian labourer was savagely attacked and set on fire, in the coastal town of Nettuno, 70 km south of Rome, allegedly by three young men.
In a separate incident in late January, four Romanian immigrants were arrested in the town of Guidonia, near Rome, for allegedly gang-raping an Italian woman.
A day after the attack, groups of Albanians and Romanians were beaten up by a mob and there were attempts to burn down Romanian-owned shops.
Last November, four youths beat up and set alight a homeless Italian man sleeping on a park bench in the northern city of Padova.
A bill passed in the Italian Senate last Thursday — proposed by the anti-immigrant Northern League party — approves volunteer vigilante groups to monitor any ‘illegal activities’ by immigrants.
However, the opposition Democratic Party (PD) introduced an amendment banning the patrols from carrying arms and limiting their role to notifying authorities of any ‘wrongdoing’ by immigrants.
Under the legislation, the patrols will be able to point out “events that can cause harm to public security, or situations of environmental distress”.
The bill is likely to be approved by Italy’s lower house of Parliament.
A phone number has also been set up in northern Italy, to recruit volunteers for the patrols. The move was organised by the northeastern Veneto region’s branch of the conservative Italian political party Forza Italia.
In addition, the legislation includes a provision calling for a ‘census’ of homeless people. The data collected will be entered into a database held by Italy’s interior ministry.
Doctors will also be allowed to report illegal immigrants to the Italian government, lifting a previous prohibition that dates to 1998.
Another law imposes a 80-200 euros charge for immigrants requesting a permit of stay in Italy, also an initiative of the Northern League, to which Maroni belongs.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Moral Question: Italy Debates the Right to Die
A debate is currently raging in Italy as to whether a coma patient should be allowed to die or not. Now that Prime Minister Berlusconi has become closely involved, the question has become a constitutional one as well.
Listening to the office of Italian President Giorgio Napolitano and one might think the issue is one hinging on an obscure constitutional question. In a statement on Friday explaining why he refused to sign an emergency government decree, Napolitano said it could damage “the reciprocal respect between powers and organs of the state.”…
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Netherlands: Top 20 ‘No-Go Areas’ Made Public
THE HAGUE, 10/02/09 — Kolenkit in Amsterdam is according to the government the number one ‘problem district’ in the Netherlands. The largest number of districts where people would rather not go are in Rotterdam.
In 2007, the housing ministry selected 40 districts throughout the Netherlands to be transformed in the next eight years from ‘problem districts’ to ‘dream districts.’ The government did give the names of the districts but refused to disclose the ranking order of the Top 40.
The Top 20 of this list has now been obtained by RTL Nieuws and been published by this TV programme. There are eight Rotterdam districts in the Top 20. Nonetheless, an Amsterdam district heads the secret ranking order: Kolenkit, in the west of the capital.
The problem districts in the Top 20 are characterised by a high density of government-owned housing, high unemployment, crime, nuisance by youngsters, and many immigrants. In Kolenkit, 80 percent of the residents are immigrants.
RTL Nieuws made a call on the Openness of Government Act (WOB) a year and a half ago to get the ranking order made public. The Council of State, the highest administrative court, however forbade this, ruling that making it public would be stigmatising.
Nonetheless, RTL Nieuws has decided to make the information public based on the principle that the public has the right to be informed on government policy. “Everyone can then judge for themselves what is happing with the spending of taxpayers’ money and whether this is having an effect. No political goings-on in backrooms, just let people judge for themselves,” was the chief editorial statement.
Kolenkit in Amsterdam is followed by the Rotterdam districts of Pendrecht, Oude Noorden and Bloemhof. Fifth comes Ondiep (Utrecht), followed by Rivierenwijk (Deventer), Spangen (Rotterdam), Oude Westen (Rotterdam), Heechterp/ Schieringen (Leeuwarden) and Noord-Oost (Maastricht).
| — Hat tip: TB | [Return to headlines] |
Poland: Gov’t Says it Did Its Best to Save Hostage in Pakistan
The Foreign Ministry will try to recover the body of the Polish engineer executed by Taliban kidnappers late last week. Questions are being asked whether the Polish government did everything it could to save the geologist.
Polish Foreign Minister Radosùaw Sikorski spoke to his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi at the security conference in Munich yesterday.
‘He’s the same person I spoke to on the phone a week ago. I urged them to move heaven and earth to save our citizen. But the Pakistani government doesn’t control these terrorists, these murderers. I hope they did everything that was possible, and now we’ll urge them to prosecute the culprits. I also expect there’ll be an official inquiry in Poland,’ said Mr Sikorski.
The Foreign Ministry’s crisis team continues to operate. Yesterday at noon its members held a press conference. Deputy Foreign Minister Jacek Najder said if the reports about the Polish geologist’s death prove true, the team will try to recover his body and bring it to Poland.
Minister Jacek Cichocki, in charge of special services at the Prime Minister’s Office, appealed to the press not to publish the footage or photographs from the Polish hostage’s execution that the kidnappers said they would make available.
Minister Najder stressed several times that the Foreign Ministry did all it could to save the Pole. Contact with the Pakistani side was made on the day the man was abducted, that is 28 September.
‘Our special envoy, Ambassador Zenon Kuchciak, remains in Pakistan and is trying to perform his mission as well as he can,’ said Mr Najder.
Did the Pakistani Gov’t Did All It Could?
The Pakistani daily The Down wrote a couple of days ago that the government in Islamabad didn’t really give the issue of the kidnapped Pole much priority. This was denied by Minister Cichocki. He said that the Pakistani authorities responded to Polish pleas and treated the case in recent days with utmost seriousness. He added that Tehrik-e-Taliban, the group that claimed responsibility for the execution, was a major threat for the Pakistani government, its armed forces and special services.
‘From the very beginning, when we found out that the Pole was in the hands of exactly this group, we knew that the situation was extremely serious,’ said Mr Cichocki. ‘The group has kidnapped several other foreigners and their demands are political, making negotiations difficult.’
According to Mr Cichocki, the revelations of the Pakistani press should be treated with reserve because the Taliban have often used the press to exert pressure on the authorities. Mr Cichocki stressed that changes in the kidnappers’ demands, pertaining for instance to the number of imprisoned terrorists that the authorities would free in return for the Pole, showed that the negotiations had been intense.
Asked how come it was possible to free two Polish citizens kidnapped in Iraq back in 2004 but no success this time, Mr Najder replied that as far as Polish secret services were concerned, Iraq and Pakistan were two different cases.
‘In Pakistan, the area where the Polish geologist was kidnapped is a conflict zone and the government doesn’t fully control the area. In Iraq, in turn, we had a military presence and all kinds of agencies in place that deal with such cases. In Pakistan, we don’t have such a presence,’ said Mr Najder.
Did the Polish Gov’t Did All It Could?
The question whether the Polish government had done its best to save the abducted Pole was discussed by politicians and the press yesterday. Most politicians, both those in the coalition and in the opposition, maintained a very restrained stance on the issue. Aleksander Szczygùo, head of the presidential National Security Bureau (BBN), said on Radio ZET that ‘we mustn’t say anything that would suggest this case is being exploited for political purposes.’
‘The less politicians say about the whole case, the better for such situations,’ said Mr Szczygùo.
Stanisùaw Ýelichowski (PSL) urged deputies ‘not to turn the case into a political affair.’ But Przemysùaw Gosiewski (PiS) suggested that the Sejm’s Special Services Committee should review the government’s handling of the case. He said the public first received optimistic news and then suddenly learned that the Pole had been killed. Mr Gosiewski was supported by Wojciech Olejniczak (SLD). And Jerzy Wenderlich (SLD) pointed out on TVN24 that the Macierewicz report (on the allegedly unlawful activities of the WSI military intelligence agency) had compromised Polish intelligence assets in Pakistan.
The Prime Minister was criticised sharply by Gen Roman Polko, former head of the GROM anti-terrorist unit, who said that Mr Tusk had made a cardinal mistake by declaring Friday that the Polish government would not pay ransom.
‘A government that agrees to pay ransom invites further kidnappings of its citizens,’ the Prime Minister said.
‘Mr Polko is a freelancer and says whatever comes into his head,’ commented Wùadysùaw Stasiak, ex-head of the BBN and Mr Polko’s former superior.
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
Poland: Sikorski: It’s Time for Full Disclosure
‘I’m ready to prove that the Foreign Ministry did everything it could to save the kidnapped Pole,’ pledges Minister Radosùaw Sikorski.
‘Personally, I’d opt for full disclosure now that nothing’s going to bring our compatriot back to life,’ Mr Sikorski said yesterday. He emphasised that the Polish government exerted pressure on the government in Islamabad via all available channels — diplomatic, military, intelligence.
‘There was a moment when it seemed we were close to success,’ said the Foreign Minister.
Since the Polish geologist’s kidnapping in western Pakistan in September, Mr Sikorski spoke several times on the phone to his Pakistani counterpart. Polish Foreign Ministry officials met also the Pakistani ambassador in Warsaw, and President Lech Kaczyñski sent a letter to Islamabad. Talks were conducted by Gen Franciszek Gàgor, head of the General Staff. Polish top-level negotiator Zenon Kuchciak was in Pakistan in December and is there now — he flew to Pakistan again a few days before the lapse of the kidnappers’ ultimatum.
But there are also indications that the cooperation between Warsaw and Islamabad was not a good as it could have been: the handing of a protest note to the charge d’affaires of the Pakistani embassy at the Foreign Ministry yesterday, and a statement by Justice Minister Andrzej Czuma, implying that there are officials in the Pakistani government who support the taliban.
Mr Czuma’s comments caused indignation at the Pakistani embassy in Warsaw yesterday.
‘We are fighting against terrorism and we did all we could to save the Pole. It’s unacceptable for a Polish minister to raise this kind of allegations,’ an embassy official told Gazeta.
‘It was unnecessary honesty, it sent shivers down my spine when I heard Minister Czuma speaking,’ commented Paweù Graú, member of the parliament’s Special Services Committee and Mr Czuma’s party colleague.
A report about the intelligence services’ handling of the case was demanded yesterday by President Lech Kaczyñski, who discussed the issue with Gen Maciej Hunia, head of the Intelligence Agency (AW), and Col Roman Kujawa, head of the Military Intelligence Service (SWW).
The parliament’s Special Services Committee, in turn, will meet to hear explanations from Krzysztof Bondaryk, head of the Internal Security Agency (ABW) and the Antiterrorist Centre, and Foreign Ministry officials, said the committee’s head Jarosùaw Zieliñski (PiS).
The State Prosecutor’s Office in Cracow, formally investigating the kidnapping of the Polish geologist, would like to secure the original tapes containing a seven-minute film showing the Pole’s execution. For now, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said, it has only received a digital copy.
‘We don’t want a digital copy because it may have been tinkered with,’ said Prosecutor Marek Weùna at the Organised Crime Bureau, State Prosecutor’s Office in Cracow. He said the persons who had taken part in the negotiations would be asked to testify. It is also possible a Polish prosecutor will go to Pakistan to secure potential evidence there.
Poland and Pakistan have no extradition agreement but, according to Mr Weùna, in this case the mechanism of mutual assistance in law enforcement could be applied (Poland would guarantee handing over a Pakistani criminal in Polish custody).
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
President Blair: Former PM Set to Become EU Chief as Sarkozy Battles to Win Him the Post
[Comment from JD: This is his reward for doing such a good job screwing up the UK.]
Tony Blair is poised to become the first President of Europe after it was confirmed that French leader Nicolas Sarkozy is determined to help him win the post.
A senior aide to President Sarkozy told a private gathering of senior British and French politicians that he is to tell fellow EU leaders that Mr Blair is the only man who can help Europe stand up to the rest of the world.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Romania’s Nurses Stick Close to Home
Romania’s nurses don’t earn much and although they can work almost anywhere in Europe, better salaries may not be enough to lure them away from home.
The former Eastern Bloc country of 22 million inhabitants seems an ideal picking ground for cheap medical professionals for Switzerland.
And it could be, if voters choose to extend a labour agreement with the European Union to new members Romania and Bulgaria on February 8.
“I think they want to stay in the country but they are not very well paid here. And the work is not so easy,” says Lamise Bectemir, the head of the paediatric oncology ward at the Marie Curie Children’s Hospital in Romanian capital, Bucharest.
There is a great wealth disparity here. The problem for Bectemir and others who consider themselves part of the middle class is that relatively meagre salaries don’t translate into low costs of living. Nurses in Romania earn between €500 (SFr750) and €1,000 per month.
At a McDonald’s restaurant a few minutes from the hospital, a hamburger meal costs around 18 lei, or roughly SFr6.50 ($5.60).
That’s less than half the price of the same sandwich, French fries and soft drink in Switzerland, but for the city’s nurses it is a relative luxury. They could earn up to five times more in a Swiss hospital.
Romania’s wages are an expression of the country’s ongoing growing pains almost two decades after the collapse of Nicolae Ceausescu’s communist regime.
For all the talk of new money in Eastern Europe, Bucharest’s buildings cast a weary shadow and its prodigious boulevards and traffic circles — crumbling edifices to the former dictator’s brand of grandiose totalitarianism — teem with a few luxury trucks and many more of the modest Dacias, the national everyman’s car.
" I am satisfied with my work here. For the moment, I earn sufficient money. Not very much but I have a decent level of living and I feel okay here. "…
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Spain: Galicia, Clashes Over Language on Eve of Elections
(by Paola Del Vecchio) (ANSAmed) — MADRID, FEBRUARY 9 — A demonstration was called in Santiago di Compostela by “Bilingual Galicia” to demand free teaching in Galician and Spanish and the possibility to choose between the two official languages in schools and in the public administration. It ended in a field battle over the reaction of a group of 250 pro-independence supporters who began throwing stones in protest over the demonstration, requiring the intervention of riot police. Ten radical pro-independence supporters were arrested, and at least four people were injured, including two police and two protesters, along with damage to public property, during the protest which erupted yesterday in the centre of the city, twenty days before regional elections on March 1. At least 5,000 people took part in the pro-Spanish demonstration, with several leaders of the Popular Party, including the former Health Minister, Ana Pastor, the Secretary General of the Galicia PP Alfonso Rueda, former Mayor of Vigo Corina Porro, and Secretary of the Union de Progreso y Democracia party Rosa Diez, and leaders of the Ciutadans Hoy party. The first skirmishes came at the start of the demonstration in Alameda square, when stones and other objects were thrown by several groups of young pro-independence supporters, causing police to charge, using plastic bullets and batons. Clashes continued until the end of the demonstration, when the procession reached the cathedral square. The groups of pro-independence supporters threw stones and bottles at police, set fire to containers and smashed shop windows, provoking fresh charges by anti-riot police. Galicia is one of the six Spanish autonomous regions where Spanish is the joint official language together with the regional language, along with the Basque country, part of Navarra, Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic islands. All regional dialects were banned during the Franco regime between 1936 and 1975, and were then legalised with the return of democracy. All Public school subjects apart from physical education, religion and Spanish are in Galician, along with all local government communications and street signs. But the regional government, unlike in Catalonia, does not impose the use of Galician on commercial signs for example. Bilingual Galicia, explained President of the movement Gloria Lago during the demonstration, demands “freedom of choice in language”. In other words, that official communications from the public administration are bilingual; that school texts “do not carry the flag of nationalism” and that students do not have Galician imposed on them as the main language. The same outgoing President of the Galicia Council and Secretary of the Galician socialists, Emilio Perez Tourino , warned in recent days against the risk of radicalising positions and exploiting the protest. Tourino told the media that “a language must always be an instrument for uniting, for enriching dialogues between cultures”. Quoting the law for linguistic normalisation which was approved in the last Galician parliament, during the Popular party’s administration, Tourino asked “why does the PP want to review the law now? To exploit the linguistic policy for party aims, to divide and incite war, is the worst damage that you can do to a country”. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Spain: Galicia, March for Spanish Language Ends in Battle
(ANSAmed) — MADRID, FEBRUARY 9 — Ten nationalists arrested, some injured and material damage: that is the balance of yesterday’s clashes during a demonstration in Santiago di Compostela for bilingualism in the region in the north of Spain. Around 5,000 members of “Bilingual Galicià”, according to police sources quoted by the media today, have participated in the demonstration for the defense of the Spanish language and against the campaign for the Galician language started by the regional council, led by socialists and nationalists. A procession started at noon from Alameda square and was interrupted when a group of nationalists who wanted to boycott the event started throwing stones and other objects. Around 250 people, according to sources, started burning trash cans, breaking shop windows and throwing stones and bottles at police cars. The anti-riot police had to intervene with truncheons and rubber bullets to disperse the nationalist radicals. Two policemen and two demonstrators of the “Bilingual Galicia” platform were injured in the riots. (ANSAmed)
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Sweden: Police Crimes Unit Launches ‘Niggersson’ Investigation
The Swedish National Police-related Crimes Unit (Riksenheten för polismål) has launched a criminal investigation against the Malmö police officers that used the fictional names “Neger Niggersson” and “Oskar Neger” (Negro) for internal training purposes.
Jörgen Lindberg, the chief public prosecutor at the Police-related Crimes Unit in Malmö, has decided to open an investigation against the officers on suspicion of the offence of racial agitation.
“The details are all there, in the press, what I shall do is take a closer look at what has occurred,” Lindberg explained to local newspaper Skånska Dagbladet.
Lindberg will now set about collecting as much information as he can from all those that attended the training course in the spring of 2008.
What is decisive in meeting the legal definition of “racial agitation” is the number of people present as witnesses. It is not sufficient to simply use racist words or phrases in speech or in writing, there has to be an element of propagation.
According to Lindberg, this explains the decision to conclude an investigation into racist comments by police officers on a police video, recorded in connection with unrest in the Malmö suburb of Rosengård in December 2008.
There were too few officers in the vehicle at the time, Lindberg said to Skånska Dagladet.
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
TV Host Quits in Big Brother Row
Reality show ran despite breaking news in right- to- die case
(ANSA) — Rome, February 10 — Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s private TV network Mediaset on Tuesday accepted the resignation of one of Italy’s best-known news show hosts in a row over how the network covered the sudden death of a woman at the centre of a right-to-die battle.
Enrico Mentana, who presented Mediaset’s flagship news show Matrix, quit Monday evening after the network refused to pull a scheduled Big Brother eviction programme on its main channel to cover the death of Eluana Englaro, who had been in a permanent vegetative state for 17 years.
Other networks such as state broadcaster RAI, Sky and LA7 immediately rescheduled programmes to make way for prime-time coverage of the case, which has sparked national debate and pitched the government and the Catholic Church against libertarians.
Mediaset covered the death on a secondary channel, Rete 4, but decided to press ahead with Big Brother on Channel 5 despite Mentana — who was also the network’s editorial director — being ready to go on air with a Matrix special.
‘‘Choices such as this damage the credibility of those that make them, and I personally have no intention of endorsing them,’’ Mentana said Monday evening. ‘‘Tonight on Channel 5 the drama was the eviction of a Big Brother contestant’’.
The Channel 5 news team expressed their solidarity with Mentana.
‘‘While RAI turned its schedule on its head for a special (topical news show), on the screens of Channel 5 the only tears shed were those of Federica in the Big Brother house. ‘‘It’s embarrassing, and unworthy of a great channel like Channel 5, which has a duty to keep its viewers informed,’’ they said.
‘‘The company’s decision to accept so freely the resignation of one of the most authoritative Italian journalists is disturbing,’’ they added.
On Monday evening Big Brother presenter Alessia Marcuzzi expressed sympathy with Eluana’s family at the beginning of the show, which drew the evening’s greatest share of television viewers — around 32%, or almost eight million.
RAI’s news special on Eluana pulled in just over four million.
Channel 5 went on to cover Eluana’s death at midnight, after Big Brother had ended.
The network’s news director-general, Mauro Crippa, said Tuesday ‘‘we must never forget that the public has different needs’’.
Reacting to Monday night’s viewing statistics, Italy’s Communications Authority President Corrado Calabro’ hit out at reality shows for dumbing down television.
‘‘They aren’t helping to improve Italians culturally,’’ he said. Photo: Enrico Mentana.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Another Muslim Ghetto Takes Shape as Head Teacher is ‘Forced Out’ for Opposing Islamic Assemblies
The resignation of a Sheffield head teacher after she tried to scrap all-Muslim assemblies is a sign of things to come. I find it far, far more worrying than the “secularism” that Christians are always complaining about.
Julia Robinson, head teacher of Meersbrook Primary School, wanted to end the divisive Islamic assembles for Muslim pupils, who make up about a quarter of her 240 pupils. Staff and many parents backed her; Muslim parents accused her of being — you’ve guessed it — “racist”.
Those Christians who think that it’s better to have separate Christian and Muslim assemblies rather than the “inclusive” services Mrs Robinson planned are missing the point. They think “faith” is good, irrespective of what faith it is. Myopic idiots.
Admittedly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the “inclusive” services were annoyingly PC, like 99 per cent of all school assemblies in Britain. And I don’t know what went on in the weekly Islamic assemblies led by a parents at Meersbrook School. But I do know this: Muslim ghettos are being constructed across the North of England, and among their building blocks are school-sanctioned meetings for children from ethnic minorities designed to turn them into strictly observant Muslims — whether they like it or not.
The Muslim indoctrination of primary school children is designed to produce young adults who reject and despise the tolerant, liberal society in which they live. No wonder staff and most parents backed Julia Robinson; we should, too.
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
UK: British Teenagers Have Lower Iqs Than Their Counterparts Did 30 Years Ago
Teenagers in Britain have lower IQ scores than their counterparts did a generation ago, according to a study by a leading expert.
Tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period.
Among those in the upper half of the intelligence scale, a group that is typically dominated by children from middle class families, performance was even worse, with an average IQ score six points below what it was 28 years ago.
The trend marks an abrupt reversal of the so-called “Flynn effect” which has seen IQ scores rise year on year, among all age groups, in most industrialised countries throughout the past century.
Professor James Flynn, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, the discoverer of the Flynn effect and the author of the latest study, believes the abnormal drop in British teenage IQ could be due to youth culture having “stagnated” or even dumbed down.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Genetic Mapping of Babies by 2019 Will Transform Preventive Medicine
[Comment from JD: Recall the society in the movie Gattaca.]
Every baby born a decade from now will have its genetic code mapped at birth, the head of the world’s leading genome sequencing company has predicted.
A complete DNA read-out for every newborn will be technically feasible and affordable in less than five years, promising a revolution in healthcare, says Jay Flatley, the chief executive of Illumina.
[…]
This will open a new approach to medicine, by which conditions such as diabetes and heart disease can be predicted and prevented and drugs prescribed more safely and effectively.
The development, however, will raise difficult questions about privacy and access to individuals’ genetic records. Many people may be reluctant to have their genome read, for fear that the results could be used against them by an employer or insurance company.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Muslim Parents Should Accept the Law of the Land
Spurious charges of racism have forced out a “marvellous” head teacher
The website of Sheffield’s Meersbrook Bank School carries a mission statement that says “we celebrate the diversity of our pupils and the community. We strive for full participation and high levels of achievement in all areas of school life.” It also quotes from its last Ofsted report:
“The caring and inclusive atmosphere of the school means that pupils feel safe, develop strong relationships with adults and one another, and have positive attitude to learning”.
It is clearly a proud and successful school that serves its local community well and takes pains not only to provide for but to celebrate the diverse nature of its local population. Yet its head teacher, Julia Robinson, has resigned after being accused by some parents of racism. Her offence? She wanted to scrap separate assemblies for Muslim children at the school.
Mrs Robinson — who has acted throughout in close consultation with the local education authority — was simply observing the law of the land which says that children in state schools in England and Wales “shall on each school day take part in an act of collective worship” which should be “wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character”.
Yet a decade ago Muslim parents — whose children make up a fifth of the school’s 240 pupils — withdrew their children from the assemblies, allegedly after a teacher tried to “force” a Muslim pupil to sing a Christian hymn. A compromise was reached whereby Muslim children would attend four of the five assemblies each week but on a Tuesday, when a more traditional Christian assembly was held, they would have a separate gathering led by one of the parents.
Mrs Robinson, acknowledged by teachers and parents to be a “marvellous” head, wanted to revert to a situation where the whole school population gathered for assembly every day. There is nothing exceptional about this. According to the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), no other school in the country holds separate assemblies for different faiths. An NAHT spokesman said: “Segregating children is not good practice. The whole point is to gather people together to share their views and to learn from other people’s viewpoints”.
In seeking to achieve just that, Mrs Robinson has — shamefully — been branded a racist by some Muslim parents. If there is racism at play here, it is not on the part of the head teacher.
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
Croatia: Chief Prosecutor of UN Tribunal Seeks Documents on War Crimes
Zagreb, 6 Feb. (AKI) — The chief prosecutor of the Hague-based United Nations war crimes tribunal (ICTY) Serge Brammertz has asked the Croatian authorities to turn over documents pertaining to crimes allegedly committed against Serb civilians during military operation “Storm” in 1995, local media reported on Friday.
Brammertz arrived to the Croatian capital Zagreb Thursday evening and met behind closed doors with deputy prime minister Jadranka Kosor and justice minister Ivan Simonovic.
Brammertz refused to comment on his visit, but Kosor said he was demanding the military diaries of the shelling of western town of Knin.
More than one thousand civilians were killed and some 200,000 Serbs fled Croatia in August 1995 when Croatian forces crushed the self-proclaimed republic created by minority rebel Serbs.
Three Croatian generals are standing trial before the ICTY for the alleged crimes, and Hague prosecutors have said the documents were vital for the prosecution of general Ante Gotovina, Mladen Markac and Ivan Cermak.
Kosor said that Croatia has handed to the tribunal “absolutely all documents it found in its archives”. But the prosecutors claim that only two of about 150 documents were turned over, while others mysteriously disappeared.
Gotovina, Cermak and Markac have been charged with murder, torture and persecution of civilians, aimed at expelling Serbs from Croatia.
Croatia is an official candidate for European Union membership, but its entry has been conditioned on full cooperation with the ICTY. “The government has no reason to hide anything from anyone, and certainly not from the prosecutors,” Kosor said.
“It would be absurd if this government obstructed the cooperation with the tribunal when our main domestic and international goal is to join the EU and NATO,” she added.
Kosor said the Croatian ministry of defence and police were investigating whether indeed some of the documents and war diaries had been put away. “Our best experts are working on that,” she said.
Brammertz is due to submit a report to the UN Security Council on Croatia’s cooperation with the tribunal and if it’s negative it would slow down Zagreb’s advances towards joining the EU.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
EU-Serbia: Belgrade Presses for Adhesion, Brussels Cautions
(ANSAmed) — BRUSSELS, FEBRUARY 9 — Serbia plans to ask for Entry candidate status in the EU before June even if Brussels advises against rushing and invites Belgrade to concentrate on capturing former General Ratko Mladic. “We will ask for candidate status by the end of the Czech Republic’s presidency” said Serbia’s deputy Prime Minister Ivica Dacic at the end of a meeting with Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn. The request to become a candidate for entry into the EU “will be independent of ratification of the Agreement for Stabilisation and Association” according to Dacic. This is currently being blocked by Holland, who want more cooperation from Belgrade with the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (TPI). Rehn called for caution however: “I would not advise the Serbians to ask for candidate status before the ASA is complete, I invite them instead to complete the reforms which Brussels is asking for, which will get them progressively closer to the Union”. The Commissioner then expressed his wish to reach the liberalisation of visas”as soon as possible, to give all Serbian citizens the possibility of moving around the Schengen area”.(ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Maroni: 90% of Landings in Lampedusa From Libya
(ANSAmed) — ROME, FEBRUARY 9- Roberto Maroni, speaking on Radio24 program L’elefanté said, “90% of people who land in Lampedusa are arriving from Libya, but there are no Libyans on board those ships, they are all migrants from other countries”. Maroni continued, “In the past days I have been to Tunisia and Libya to apply a double system that worked in the past with Albania including aid for economic development and strict border control”. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi underlined that “he signed an agreement with Libya to provide aid and investments and commits Libya to control its borders at the same time. If the agreement is implemented, something that I do not doubt, we will be able to achieve the same results in the southern Mediterranean that we did with Albania”. (ANSAmed)
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Serbia-EU: Moratinos Asks Netherlands to Remove Veto
(ANSAmed) — BELGRADE, JANUARY 12 — Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos has asked the Netherlands to change its immovable stance regarding Serbia and remove its veto applied to the Stabilisation and Association Agreements (SAA) between the EU and Belgrade. Speaking at an ambassadors conference in the Serbian capital, Moratinos praised Serbia’s efforts made to move towards EU integration. Underlining how the governments of all the other 26 EU member countries do not have any reservations about the enactment of the SAA with Belgrade, Moratinos urged the Netherlands to remove their reservations, allowing full SAA application. This agreement, which is an important step on the path towards EU membership and which was signed last April 29, was unilaterally ratified by Serbia alone, while the Netherlands’ veto has prevented a ratification by Brussels. The condition imposed by the Netherlands is the capture of Ratko Mladic, the ex military head of the Serbians in Bosnia, one of two Serbian war criminals still in hiding with Goran Hadzic, head of the Serbians in Croatia. Last July, Radovan Karadzic, the political head of the Serbians in Bosnia, was captured in Belgrade. Moratinos — who met with Serbian President Boris Tadic and Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic — praised Belgrade’s efforts for European integration, speaking of a “new, contemporary, dynamic, and democratic” Serbia. The minister used the example of Spain, which waited for 9 years before entering into the EU, working on reforming its political, economic, and cultural institutions. Serbian leaders at the same time thanked Moratinos for the support of Spain in Serbia’s territorial integrity. In fact, Madrid, with few other EU countries (Cyprus, Romania, Slovakia, Greece), did not recognise the unilateral independence proclaimed by Kosovo. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Serbia-EU: Greek Minister, Netherlands Position Unjust
(ANSAmed) — BELGRADE, FEBRUARY 3 — Netherlands is unfairly blocking Serbia’s entry into the European Union with its insistence on making the arrest and handing over of Ratko Mladic to the Criminal Court in Hague (TPI) a condition, said Greek Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis during a visit to Belgrade yesterday where she met Serbian officials. “I firmly believe that the Serbian government has clearly shown its wish to fully cooperate with the Hague Tribunal” said Bakoyannis. “I believe that the large majority of my colleagues in the EU know this, and they realise that we cannot hold a democratic government, a young democracy, hostage over its past, despite the arrival of clear messages from them,” she added. Bakoyannis expressed her intention to try to convince the Dutch authorities that their position “is unjust towards Serbia.” Netherlands is the only EU member state blocking the implementation of several important preliminary agreements leading to Serbia’s membership into the EU, in particular the ASA, the Agreement on Stabilisation and Association. They are asking that Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb leader accused of genocide and crimes against humanity over the massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995, be arrested first. Greece holds the presidency of the Organisation for security and cooperation in Europe (OSCE) this year.(ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Agriculture: Spanish Producers Against EU-Morocco Pact
(ANSAmed) — MADRID, FEBRUARY 9 — As the EU and Morocco finalise a new agricultural agreement which will allow the north African country to export a larger quantity of produce, Spanish agricultural organisations and the Spanish federation of fruit and vegetable producers and exporters (FEPEX) is asking that their interests in Europe are protected. Spanish producers fear that an increase in supply will have a negative impact on the sector, particularly in the fall in prices of produce such as tomatoes, French beans, citrus fruits, peppers and strawberries. Farmers have already announced protest movements in Almeria. According to sources, Spain, alongside Belgium and Poland, has sent a letter to the European Commission expressing the farmers’ fears and reminding them “to take into account the industry’s interests within the EU”. The agreement in place between the EU and Morocco, which dates back to 2003, puts an initial cap of 175,000 metric tonnes on tomatoes which can be exported into Europe between October and May; to this figure may be added a further total quantity of between 25,000 and 45,000 metric tonnes per year, whilst Morocco will be obliged to pay exportation taxes. In the reworked agreement, which is now in its final stages, the north African country hopes to raise the initial quantity to 200,000 metric tonnes. In recent years, Spanish agricultural organisations have cried out against the lack of sufficient controls along the borders to control the amount of Moroccan produce which arrives in Europe. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Security: Algeria Ratifies Agreement With Spain
(ANSAmed) — ALGIERS, FEBRUARY 9 — Algeria has ratified a security agreement involving the fight against terrorism and organised crime, signed by Spain in June and ratified with a Presidential Decree by Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, published in the latest edition of the Algerian Official Gazette. A key point in the agreement, signed on June 15 in a visit to Algiers by Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez, is the strengthening of bilateral cooperation against terrorism and organised crime, particularly against “violations that endanger lives”, drug trafficking, counterfeiting, kidnapping, illegal immigration, and cyberfraud. (ANSAmed)
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Algeria: Al Qaeda Attacks Bouteflika Re Spy Accused of Rape
(ANSAmed) — ALGIERS, FEBRUARY 9 — In a statement issued via internet and printed in Algeria’s El Kabar newspaper, The Al Qaeda Organisation for the Islamic Maghreb (the former Salafite Group for preaching and combat) has accused the Algerian authorities, and in particular President Abdelaziz Boteflika of “betraying his people and letting a CIA chief violate the dignity of Algerian women who belong to the Islamic nation, and thus offending the whole Muslim population”. This “shows that Bouteflika and his government are traitors like all (Arab, Ed.) presidents. Al Qaeda Maghreb is no more than a legitimate result of the struggle against French and American expansionism”. The north African branch of Al Qaeda, writes El Kabar, has claimed responsibility for several attacks in Algeria in recent months, without specifying which ones. A CIA agent, Andrew Warren has been accused of drugging and raping two Algerian women inside his residence at the US Embassy in Algiers. The agent was sent home at the end of October and an enquiry is now under way in Washington. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Algeria: Al-Qaeda Message Calls President a Traitor
Algiers, 9 Feb. (AKI) — A new message purportedly from Al-Qaeda accuses Algeria’s president Abdelaziz Bouteflika (photo) of betraying his country by allowing a CIA agent accused of raping two women while he was stationed there to return home.
“O beloved nation, what more do you want these rulers to do to make you to speak with one voice and say ‘enough’!” said the message posted to Islamist websites.
“Doesn’t this scandal prove to you that Bouteflika and his government are no different from that of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan or Nouri al-Maliki’s in Iraq?” the message said.
The CIA has said one of its agents has returned to the United States after being accused last September of committing the two rapes in Algeria.
The scandal could take its toll on Bouteflika’s prospects in polls taking place on 9 April. He is running for election to a third presidential term.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Maghreb: Year 2959, Berber New Year’s Celebration
(ANSAmed) — ALGIERS, JANUARY 12 — In Algeria and the entire Maghreb region Yennaier, the Berber New Year is being celebrated, which according to the traditional calendar based on the agricultural seasons, falls every year on January 12. If the Gregorian has just entered into 2009, for ‘Imazighen’ (free men) it is 2959. In Algeria, ‘Tawurt n usegwaa’, in Amazigh ‘the door of the year’, is particularly important in the Kabyles, the pre-eminently Berber region east of Algiers and by the Touareg populations in the south. For decades the Berbers, the native population in the region, have fought for the respect of their culture and language which has survived centuries of overlap and imposition from Arab-Islamic culture. After a bloody battle, the Amazigh was recognised in Algeria as the national language in 2002, but not the official language at the level of Arabic. According to historians, Yennayer was born in Egypt in 951 BCE when the Berbers who were supplying the food to the Egyptian armies, obtained formidable political success, earning the right to observe their cultural practices, mainly funerary rites and spiritual practices.(ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Israel: Security the Big Issue as Voters Go to the Polls
Jerusalem, 9 Feb. (AKI) — Security is expected to be the dominant issue when voters go to the polls in Israel’s national elections on Tuesday. Pollsters were predicting a tight finish in the elections with many voters reportedly still undecided.
While Binyamin Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party and its main centrist rival Kadima seek control of the 120-member Knesset or Parliament that will ultimately determine who will be prime minister, a number of smaller parties have emerged across the political spectrum to contest the country’s elections.
Thirty-four groups submitted lists of candidates to run in the elections, but it is difficult to assess their influence on the final outcome.
“The trend we’ve seen the last few days indicates a very close battle,” said pollster Rafi Smith of the Smith Research Centre. “No one has jumped ahead and it’s tough to call.”
Likud has been the front-runner in the election race since November, when foreign minister Tzipi Livni of the ruling Kadima party was forced to call a new election. Livni was unable to form a new government when prime minister Ehud Olmert resigned over serious corruption allegations.
While the gap between Likud and its closest rival, Kadima, has since narrowed, the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party is also drawing support from traditional Likud supporters.
As candidates for prime minister, Israelis have complained they have a choice between two failed premiers — Netanyahu and Ehud Barak — or a relatively unknown candidate, Tzipi Livni.
Barak is currently defence minister and chairman of the Labour Party.
Marcus Sheff, from The Israel Project, an international non-profit group, said on Monday that there had been a shift to the right because many voters had a feeling of “despair” after three major conflicts involving Israel since 2002.
Sheff said many Israelis were afraid of the ruling Islamist Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip and that has hardened attitudes and heightened their preoccupation with security.
The election race has focused on security issues in the wake of Israel’s three-week Gaza offensive against Hamas.
More than 1,330 Palestinians were killed and another 5,400 were wounded in Israel’s military attacks that were initiated to stop Hamas firing rocket attacks at Israel.
Leading candidates have stepped up their efforts to attract undecided voters.
Labour was reportedly focusing on undecided voters who were leaning towards Kadima, as well as on the Israeli Arabs.
According to the Israeli daily, Haaretz, Kadima hoped to trump Likud by drawing Leftist voters to its camp, while Likud has stepped up its hawkish stance, in the hope of bringing back voters who support the hard-line Yisrael Beiteinu Party.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Israel: Vote, Haaretz for Livni, Maariv Halves Front Page
(ANSAmed) — TEL AVIV, FEBRUARY 10 — Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, made an explicit appeal to voters today in an editorial asking voters to elect Tzipi Livni. Livni, explained the newspaper, “is not the ideal candidate”, however, her efforts favouring peace with Palestinians should be preferred over Netanyahu’s Likud, which favours “extremist” positions, supporting settlements, something that “risks conflict with the Obama administration”. Maariv made an original welcome to “the next Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu” and “the next Prime Minister Tzipi Livni” on the front page picturing a deck of cards cut in half: the top half of the newspaper displays Netanyahu, while turning the newspaper upside-down, Livni’s face was pictured, highlighting the close race to win the majority between Likud and Kadima. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
EU-Turkey: Opposition Party, ‘No’ to New Cyprus Enquiry
(ANSAmed) — BRUSSELS, FEBRUARY 9 — The European Commission has stated that Turkey’s entry into the EU is “strictly linked to the reunification of Cyprus”, but, according to the head of the CHP opposition party, Ankara is not willing to conduct a new enquiry into the situation in Cyprus. “We hope that 2009 will not see further evaluation of EU-Ankara relations based around the Cypriot question”, Deniz Baykal, the head of the major opposition party, CHP (Republican people’s party), said today, at the end of a meeting with the EU Enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn. Baykal assured that Turkey will offer “a decisive contribution” to the solution which cannot be anything other than the creation of “a federal state”. Rehn, on the other hand, who is to visit Cyprus at the end of the week, reminded of “the extreme importance of reuniting the island”, both for the EU and for Turkey and of course for Cyprus itself. He repeated “the commission’s maximum support, in order for current negotiations to have a successful outcome”. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Gaza: Turkish Consumers to Boycott Israeli, USA, US Products
(ANSAmed) — ANKARA, JANUARY 12 — Consumers Association of Turkey calls on Turkish citizens to boycott Israeli, US and British products by saying “We will not provide ammunition for siyonist Israel’s attacks”, local press reported. Consumers Association members protested Israel in front of Israeli Embassy and announced the list of products that they wanted consumers not to buy. “The ones who can survive from bombings may die because of lack of medicine and food”, Bulent Deniz, Honorary President of Consumer Association, said, adding that “we will use our power as consumers and boycott Israel, US and British products”. The Consumers Association issued a list of products to boycott because “those firms openly declare their support and cooperation to Israel, as well as the ones that transfer funds to Israeli army”. Some of them include Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos, Hayat Su, Danone, Activa, Elite Cafe, Becel, Lipton, Calve, Knorr, Algida, Magnum, Carte D’or, Axe, Rexona, Signal, Dove, Omo, Domestos, Marlboro, Parliament, Lark, Muratti, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Starbucks Coffee chain, Mc Donald’s and Burger King. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Interpol Issues Unprecedented Global Alert for 85 Terrorist Suspects Wanted by Saudi Arabia
LYON, France — An international security alert, known as an Orange Notice, has been issued by INTERPOL for 85 terrorists suspected of plotting attacks against Saudi Arabia from abroad.
INTERPOL’s General Secretariat headquarters published the global alert at the request of INTERPOL’s National Central Bureau (NCB) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The 83 Saudis and two Yemenis are wanted at the national level by Saudi Arabia on terrorism-related charges, including links to al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan.
General Mansoor Al-Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Ministry of Interior, said that INTERPOL was asked for assistance because its global police network and tools provided essential elements for locating and detaining fugitives for their eventual extradition to Saudi Arabia. He also urged the suspects to turn themselves in.
INTERPOL’s Orange Notice, sent to all of its 187 member countries, includes identifying details of each of the terror suspects to help law enforcement officers worldwide in their search and eventual identification when located and arrested.
“By asking for INTERPOL’s assistance, Saudi Arabia wishes to ensure that all INTERPOL member countries are made aware that these men are dangerous and that their activities represent a security concern not only for Saudi Arabia and the entire region but also for the world as a whole,” said INTERPOL Secretary General Ronald K. Noble.
“Never before has INTERPOL been asked to alert the world about so many dangerous fugitives at one time; we know that we are approaching the 16th anniversary of the first World Trade Center bombing on 26 February 2009 and therefore must be especially vigilant of fugitive al Qaeda terrorists,” said Secretary General Noble.
More than 5,000 fugitives wanted by INTERPOL were arrested in 2008. There are currently more than 13,000 persons listed in INTERPOL’s database of individuals linked to terrorist activities.
The Orange Notice was originally created to warn police, public entities and other international organizations of potential threats related to disguised weapons, explosives and other dangerous materials; however, it can also be issued by INTERPOL’s General Secretariat headquarters in Lyon for any act or event which poses a risk to the safety and security of citizens around the world.
INTERPOL’s 75th General Assembly meeting in Brazil in 2006 urged member countries to immediately inform the global law enforcement community via INTERPOL’s General Secretariat headquarters whenever there are suspected terrorists on the loose who could pose a danger to the police and citizens of any country to which the suspects might flee; and to immediately provide information to other member countries via the General Secretariat headquarters to issue a security alert, to help law enforcement worldwide to identify, locate, and apprehend the suspects.
| — Hat tip: VH | [Return to headlines] |
Iran Builds Four More Satellites
TEHRAN (Reuters) — Iran is building four more satellites, the telecommunications minister was quoted on Sunday as saying, after the Islamic Republic put its first domestically produced satellite into orbit last week.
Iran launched a research and telecom satellite, called Omid, on Tuesday, a step that worried Western powers who fear Tehran is seeking to build a nuclear bomb and missile delivery systems.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Turkey-Syria: Trade Volume Increased by Business Council
(ANSAmed) — ANKARA, FEBRUARY 9 — The head of Turkish-Syrian Business Council said on Saturday that the trade volume between Turkey and Syria increased by nearly three times after the establishment of a joint business council by the countries in 2000. Foreign Economic Relations Board (DEIK) of Turkey released a statement on the economic relations between Turkey and Syria, citing Turkish-Syrian Business Council chairperson Ruhsar Pekcan’s opinions on the issue. “Before 2000, the trade volume between Turkey and Syria was around 250-300 million USD. However, after the Turkish-Syrian Business Council was set up, such figure rose up to 750-800 million USD,” adding that the trade volume between the countries was approximately 1.8 billion USD in 2008 and the council desired such figure to reach 2.5 billion USD in 2009. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Turkey: Oldest Christian Monastery at Risk
(by Furio Morroni) (ANSAmed) — ANKARA — The Mor Gabriel monastery, the oldest Syrian Orthodox Christian convent of its kind is at risk of disappearing if a Turkish court decides on Wednesday that it is situated on land which belongs to someone else. The dispute, which has caught the attention of the world since the first hearing on January 12, is over land in the remote village of Midyat, in south eastern Anatolia close to the Syrian border. On a hilltop covered with oak trees on the Tur Abdin plateau — ‘‘The mountain of the servants of God’’, in Aramaic’’ — monks Samuel and Simon founded the monastery in 397 which was later enriched with buildings ordered by Roman emperors Arcadius, Onorius and Theodosius the Second. Three monks, 14 nuns and 35 young people who study religion and Aramaic live in the convent, which is the spiritual centre of the now sparse Syriac Orthodox community (3,000 souls) in Turkey. It is also the headquarters of the Bishop Mor Timotheus Samuel Aktash. Last August the Muslim heads of the three villages next to the monastery began legal action saying that the monks had unlawfully appropriated the land that the monastery is sited on and asking for its expropriation seeing that ‘‘there was a mosque there in earlier times’’. Despite the obvious absurdity of the claim — the monastery dates back to 397, around 170 years before the birth of the prophet Mohammed and the construction of any mosque — the Turkish Court of Justice has given its blessing to the legal action. According to some, the trial is intended more to protest about the monks’ supposed acts of conversion than to reclaim the land. Village chiefs are asking that the land be appropriated and divided into three, and that a wall built in the 1990s when the convent was in the firing line between the Turkish army and the separatist PKK party (Kurdistan Workers Party) be taken down. The accusations against the monastery are unfounded, said David Gelen, leader of the Aramaic Federation, who said that |’a campaign of intimidation’’ is under way against the convent members. ‘‘The Bishop, monks and nuns are being threatened iin ever more direct ways by the inhabitants of the villages: they would not dare to appear at the trial to defend themselves in any way. For a long time, the monks and nuns have not had the courage to leave the confines of the monastery. Freedom of expression is guaranteed by the Constitution in Turkey. But recognition of minorities is not guaranteed. The Syriac Orthodox community, unlike the Greeks and Armenians, are not currently recognised as a religious minority, even though they have been on this land for thousands of years. The objective of the threats and the trial seems to be a way of punishing and expelling this minority from Turkey, like a foreign body’’. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
P. D. Ouspensky and the Nightmare of Revolution
Ouspensky repeats a refrain in all five letters that Bolshevism, being barbarism with a fancy vocabulary, constitutes a threat not only in Russia, but anywhere, hence also everywhere, because it is a destabilizing condition of ordered life, so arduously achieved, always to carry with it “barbarian forces existing inside [the] society, hostile to culture and civilization.” I could not help connecting a recent remark made by Sean Gabb in a Brussels Journal entry with the foregoing words by Ouspensky.
In a discussion of “hate speech” laws and their selective enforcement, Gabb notes that, “the soviet socialists and the national socialists kept control by the arbitrary arrest and torture or murder of suspected opponents,” but that these methods are currently “not… acceptable in England or in the English world.” Nevertheless, writes Gabb, censorious speech-legislation involving intimidating criminalization of certain words or verbal attitudes “has nothing really to do with politeness,” but is, rather, “about power.” So it is as well in the United States and Canada. Wherever governments and elites seek to control expression, whether or not as Gabb observes it has to do ostensibly with “diversity and inclusiveness,” the real agenda is to achieve “the unlimited power to plunder and enslave us, while scaring us into the appearance of gratitude for our dispossession.”
I would say that “hate crime” and “hate speech” laws represent a trial balloon of totalitarian methods. Such methods are barbarous. They betray the basic decency of the Western achievement. They take root in “the worst forces,” as Ouspensky says, “underlying our life.” Now “ought” is a counterfactual word. But it strikes me that if history taught only one lesson to the civilized it would be that as soon as any visibly power-hungry group succeeds in an agenda of intimidation, no matter how minor, sensible people dedicated to their own freedom ought to respond with all necessary resistance until the aggressors have themselves been intimidated into a retreat. Better indeed to quash such attempts before their first success, but that is a more difficult proposition. Ouspensky’s book explains what happens when timidity rather than vigor is the keynote of response to internal barbarism. So does a great library of other books, all of which came later, however, than Ouspensky’s.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
India: Army ‘Prepared’ for Strikes Against Pakistan
New Delhi, 9 Feb. (AKI/Asian Age) — Indian army chief General Deepak Kapoor said surgical strikes against terror targets in Pakistan were a “feasible” option after the Mumbai terror attacks.
“Surgical strikes are definitely feasible but whether you wish to take that decision or not is a separate issue,” Kapoor said on Sunday.
“Whether you would like to look at doing it (carrying out such strikes) by air or artillery or by another means or physically there,” he said.
He said that the armed forces were ready for such strikes if political leaders gave the order. Kapoor’s comments are likely to provoke further tension between Pakistan and India.
“We are an army which has been involved in operations in Kashmir and Northern Command on a perpetual and on-going basis. Therefore, the question of not being ready is, frankly, not relevant. And we would have been fully ready to do our task,” he said.
“The peaceful diplomatic course adopted by the Indian government so far seems to have provided stimuli to the Pakistan government to act against the terror infrastructure and help bring the guilty to book.”
He said that after the Mumbai attack, no deployment of additional troops had taken place on the border.
“However, we are maintaining our utmost vigil and closely monitoring the situation. Our current posture allows us to achieve full operational readiness at short notice,” he stated.
During a wide-ranging interview, the Kapoor also sought to dispel the impression that there was no clarity about the nuclear command when prime minister Manmohan Singh was hospitalised for heart surgery last month.
“As far as the army is concerned, there is a clarity on the nuclear command issue and there was no confusion on the issue,” he added.
Relations between India and Pakistan have been under renewed strain since the terror attacks that targeted two luxury hotels and other city landmarks in the Indian city of Mumbai last November.
A total of 173 people died and hundreds of others were injured. One gunman survived and Islamabad admitted this month he is a Pakistani citizen.
In January Pakistan bowed to international pressure and arrested 124 militants suspected of involvement in the deadly terrorist attacks.
The government said it had closed five training camps and 20 offices belonging to banned charity Jamaat-ud-Dawa and the outlawed Kashmiri separatist group, Lashkar-e-Toiba.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Indian Maoists Kill 10 Cops
PATNA (India) — INDIAN Maoists have killed 10 policemen in the eastern state of Bihar, where a rebel insurgency has been active for decades, police said on Tuesday.
A group of 18 officers were attacked while on duty at a temple function in an isolated village near the state border with Jharkhand, a stronghold of Maoist rebels in India.
‘Ten policemen were killed late Monday in the well-planned attack,’ a senior Bihar police officer told AFP.
The Maoist insurgency, which grew out of a peasant uprising in 1967, has hit more than half of India’s 29 states.
The rebels, who use a heavily forested region in central Chhattisgarh state as their base, say they are fighting for the rights of neglected tribal people and landless farmers.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described the Maoists as the biggest overall threat to the country’s security. — AFP
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Malaysia: Ready to Review Race Policy
KUALA LUMPUR — MALAYSIA is ready to review and gradually liberalise its race-based economic policies to promote new investment, the country’s influential trade minister said. ‘We will slowly liberalise where possible when we are ready, and this will provide new avenues for foreign and domestic investments,’ Minister of International Trade and Industry Muhyiddin Yassin told reporters on Tuesday.
Mr Muhyiddin, who did not specify which economic sectors would be liberalised, was responding to a call by a top banker, the brother of the incoming premier, who said Malaysia needed to review the New Economic Policy (NEP).
Mr Nazir Razak, the chairman of Malaysia’s CIMB Bank and the brother of Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak said last week that the NEP, which favours the majority Malay population, had damaged national cohesion and hindered investment in this Asian country of 27 million people.
The policy, which is also opposed by opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, was designed in 1971 after race riots to narrow the wealth gap between the majority Malays and the richer ethnic Chinese.
It gives Malays who account for about 60 per cent of the population preferential treatment in certain aspects of business, education and home ownership, although critics say it is now outdated and has led to cronyism and corruption.
Malaysia also has come under pressure from several countries including the United States to open up access to government procurement where the bulk of contracts are given to Malay contractors under the NEP.
Britain has called for Malaysia to liberalise its services sector.
The National Front coalition suffered major losses in last year’s general in election in part due to unhappiness over the NEP among Malaysia’s ethnic Chinese and Indian population.
Najib is set to lead the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the leading party in the National Front coalition, after the party’s polls in March.
Mr Najib, addressing an ethnically mixed audience at an event on Sunday, said the government would make the necessary changes to its policies to regain the people’s trust.
He did not specify what changes would be made and political analysts say he will have limited space to push through reforms at a time when the battle for ethnic Malay voters is intensifying.
The coalition has lost two by-elections in the rural Malay heartland in the past six months.
Mr Muhyiddin, who is a candidate for the deputy presidency of UMNO in the March elections, said the NEP was ‘good’ but had weaknesses in its implementation. — REUTERS
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Fire Ravages Renowned Building in Beijing
BEIJING — A fierce blaze started by an illegal fireworks show engulfed one of the Chinese capital’s most architecturally celebrated modern buildings on Monday, the last day of festivities for the Lunar New Year, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday.
The fire was not extinguished until early Tuesday morning. Xinhua, quoting a fire official, said a fireworks company had been hired to ignite several hundred large firecrackers in an open space outside the building, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which was under construction.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Philippines: AFP: ‘Noose Tightening’ on Icrc Captors
MANILA, Philippines — The military is “tightening the noose” on members of the Abu Sayyaf in an attempt to force a “non-violent resolution” to the kidnapping of three workers of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Sulu, the Armed Forces’ spokesman on the hostage problem said Tuesday.
“The rescue operation is there, ongoing… [W]e are tightening the area, we cordoned off the area…to force them [Abu Sayyaf] into a non-violent resolution of the crisis,” Brigadier General Gaudencio Pangilinan said.
Despite the clashes, Pangilinan said intelligence reports indicate Swiss Andreas Notter, Italian Eugenio Vagni, and Filipina Jean Lacaba remain safe.
“They are always sighted. There are intelligence reports on where they are, but…we cannot discuss [that] openly … The hostages, so far as of last report, are unharmed,” he said.
Fighting broke out Monday when members of the Abu Sayyaf faction holding the aid workers tried to break through the cordon set up by government troops and armed civilians.
“We [are] tightening the noose slowly. The engagement yesterday [Monday] was [the] result of them [kidnappers] trying to get out. They fired first,” he said.
Since the fighting broke out Monday afternoon Pangilinan said nine soldiers have been reported wounded in the clashes.
Eight civilians were also wounded by shrapnel from rocket-propelled grenades in an attack on Barangay (village) Busbus, Jolo, near the 3rd Marine Brigade headquarters, around 3 a.m. Tuesday that Pangilinan blamed on groups sympathetic to the Abu Syyaf.
He said the attack was meant to “maybe attract…media attention to those calling for a ceasefire, for those wanting to call for the pullout of troops.”
Pangilinan said the military has encircled a four-square kilometer area where they believe the kidnappers are hiding.
He said there is no need to augment troops in Sulu but added that Major General (not brigadier as reported earlier) Juancho Sabban, commander of the anti-terror Task Force Comet, has shifted some of his forces towards where the kidnappers are.
Pangilinan said the kidnappers’ chances of getting away with their hostages are “very slim.”
“Slim, very slim,” he said. “Number one, they cannot get out of the island; number [two], they cannot get out of the cordon. That is the purpose of General Sabban’s operation.”
“If we can pinpoint their location, then we move in. But General Sabban is very careful. We have instructions from our superiors to be deliberate on this. Again the safety of the hostages, that is the prime concern, if [Sabban] believes he can rescue [the victims] with force or no force, then it is his call,” Pangilinan said.
He said Task Force ICRC, the multi-agency group headed by Sulu Governor Abdusakur Tan, which was created to work on the safe release of the aid workers, has not asked the military to suspend its operations.
“We have not received any request, there is nothing like that. They are with us, we are in touch with them, we update them about what’s going on, we made it clear to them that the safety of the hostages is the prime concern,” Pangilinan said.
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
Australia: Australia’s Grief as Fire Death Toll ‘Could Hit 300’… and Police Close in on Arsonists
Terrifying reports emerging from the bushfire wastelands suggest today that the final death toll could soar to a heartbreaking 300.
The confirmed body count rose to 181 today as a furious Australian Premier Kevin Rudd the arsonists responsible should ‘rot in jail.’
‘This is unspeakable murder on a mass scale,’ he said.
Police sources have indicated that the number of those who died will soar dramatically — although they decline to announce this publicly.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Acy: Turkey Moves to Deploy Warship Off Somalia
(ANSAmed) — ANKARA, FEBRUARY 9 — Turkey will deploy a warship as part of a UN-led force off the Somali coast to prevent pirates from hijacking foreign ships, Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said, as reported by Today’s Zaman daily. The government presented a motion to Parliament to allow Turkey to deploy naval forces in the region, where more than a dozen commercial vessels have been hijacked by pirates. There have been various exercises to decide on the precautions against piracy, Babacan said. The first option for Turkey was for every nation to send its own naval vessels; the second was to join an EU taskforce codenamed Operation Atalanta; and the third option was joining the UN-led force. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Mauritania: MP, African Union Sanctions Don’t Solve Problems
(ANSAmed) — PARIS, FEBRUARY 6 — The sanctions decided yesterday by the African Union Peace and Security Council (Cps) against the junta which has seized power in Mauritania on August 6 “will not correct the basic problems” according to the president of the parliamentary group of the majority in the national assembly, Mohamed Aly Cherif, who supports the coup. “We respect the AU and its bodies, but we were surprised and astonished by decisions which in the end don’t resolve anything” he said. “Our surprise is intensified by the fact that since the Cps’s mission is peace and security in Africa, it shouldn’t therefore decide on individual or group sanctions in a case in which dialogue must be preferred”. Cherif then said that he regrets that the AU has “ignored the reality of Mauritania, the feelings and opinions expressed by the majority of its Parliament, of the town councils and the people, which welcome the change of August 6”. The deputy added that the military power “will remain open to dialogue, will continue the project to organise free and transparent presidential elections on June 6, that way restoring constitutional order”. The Cps has forbidden the members of the junta to leave the country, refusing to give out visas for them, and has decided that bank accounts will be checked. Opposition leader Ahmed Ould Daddah has proposed that in order to resolve crisis, the soldiers must step down, and dismissed president Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi should not return to office, and the members of the junta that seized power on August 6 2008 should ineligible for election in the coming elections. The opposition leader believes that if the junta stays in charge the country will be further isolated internationally, and new “even more devastating” economic and political sanctions are likely to be issued. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Algeria: Soon Vessels for Night Patrols
(ANSAmed) — ALGIERS, FEBRUARY 9 — The Algerian Coast Guard active in the West of Algeria will soon have new vessels equipped with systems for night patrols, announced colonel Mafhoudh Belmeddah quoted by APs during an information week on the Algerian Navy organised in Orano (400 km west of Algiers). “The equipment for our western fleet” said Belmeddah “will allow us to patrol the sea at night”, both for rescue operations and the battle against illegal immigration. According to the Coast Guard, in 2008 418 migrant were detained off the western coast of the Maghreb country. In the same region, from which most boats with migrants leave for Spain, 48 bodies were found in the sea. Last year 98 bodies were found along the whole Algerian coast. A total of 1335 persons were detained, among whom 1327 Algerians. Of all arrested migrants 636 were intercepted in the east, 442 in Annaba (600km east of Algiers) from where boats set sail for Italy. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Finland: Municipalities Reluctant to Accept Immigrants on Current Funding Levels
A cash injection of one million euros is being given to speed up the process of resettling immigrants in various parts of Finland. However, many quota refugees from 2006 are still waiting for a new home, and reluctant municipalities say the money on offer falls far short of what is needed.
Money in the government’s supplementary budget coming before parliament on Tuesday will help recruit about 15 more officials to clear the bottleneck of immigrants seeking work permits. Currently about 4,000 applications are in the pipeline with a further 500 every month.
The Finnish Immigration Service says much more cash is needed. It wants a wide range of resources to help immigrants find a new life in the country. Its Director-General wants more resources across the board to solve the current delay in processing immigrants’ residence permit applications.
“If additional resources are not forthcoming, immigrants will stay in the reception centres if the municipalities don’t take them,” Vuorio adds.
Keeping an adult immigrant in a reception centre costs the Finnish taxpayer around 16,000 euros annually. It’s far more economical to subsidize an immigrant’s own home, help with job seeking and to arrange Finnish language training.
However, the rate paid to local government for each immigrant has remained unchanged from 1993. This has also contributed to a backlog in getting immigrants out of reception centres.
The Uusimaa Employment and Development Centre works with municipalities to find suitable locations to resettle immigrants and refugees. Minna Mattila, its Senior Planning Officer, is concerned about the long delays immigrants encounter before finding a new home in Finland.
“I would like the municipalities to take especially the quota refugees as soon as possible. We have a back log of people from 2006 and they are still waiting,” she notes.
Municipalities are reluctant to accept immigrants often for purely financial reasons. Börje Mattson, Immigrant Co-ordinator of the Western Uusimaa area wants a long term financial arrangement between state and local government. In his view, this is essential to provide the necessary resources to ensure proper integration into Finnish society.
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
Maroni: Doctors Do Not Have to Report
(ANSAmed) — ROME, FEBRUARY 9 — “We have not introduced any obligation for doctors to report illegal immigrants, we have simply removed the ban on the possibility of reporting them”, said Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, during a radio program. Maroni noted that “in 1998, a ban on doctors reporting illegal immigrants was introduced. It went so far as to arrive at the aberration whereby a doctor who wanted to report an illegal immigrant was committing a crime”. The minister proceeded to say that “several newspapers have put something untrue on their front pages by writing that reporting immigrants was obligatory. That is false. If the doctor does not want to report the immigrant then he does not do so. But it is not right to punish a doctor who perhaps wants to report an illegal immigrant injured by a girl that he has raped”. Maroni therefore underlined that “all European countries have a situation that we want to introduce ourselves, and there is therefore no ban on doctors reporting illegal immigrants. In Germany, in fact, they are obligated to do so”. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Norway: Threats Against Immigrants
A number of immigrants and asylum seekers in Norway are threatened and pursued by foreign security services or other agents from their homeland, according to the Security Service of the Norwegian Police (PST). PST is aware that security services from several countries are monitoring the activities of dissidents who have fled from regimes at home, and that several of these regimes have representatives in Norway.
PST Chief Joern Holme does not know how many such agents there are in this country, but that there may be many of them, and that some may be posing as asylum seekers.
| — Hat tip: Tuan Jim | [Return to headlines] |
Waunakee Parents in ‘an Uproar’ Over Teaching Social Studies in Spanish
Being taught about famous people and events in Wisconsin history in Spanish is not how some Waunakee parents want their fourth-graders learning social studies at school.
“We as parents have been in such an uproar over this,” said Keith Wilke about the district’s elementary language program in which students learn Spanish by having the language integrated into social studies lessons for 30 minutes three days a week in first through fourth grades. “They’re force-fed Spanish.”
This is the third year for the program, which has added one grade a year since 2006 and is designed to continue until fifth grade.
“A fair amount of (social studies instruction) has been in Spanish,” said Wilke, who has a daughter in fourth grade. “The kids are to the point where they don’t understand it.”
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
New Study of Splenda Reveals Shocking Information About Potential Harmful Effects
James Turner, the chairman of the national consumer education group Citizens for Health, has expressed shock and outrage after reading a new report from scientists outlining the dangers of the artificial sweetener Splenda (sucralose).
In animals examined for the study, Splenda reduced the amount of good bacteria in the intestines by 50 percent, increased the pH level in the intestines, contributed to increases in body weight and affected P-glycoprotein (P-gp) levels in such a way that crucial health-related drugs could be rejected.
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