Archive for December 2008

MONROE, La. —Jena Six icon Mychal Bell is in legal trouble again.

Bell, 18, is free on bond following a Christmas Eve arrest on multiple charges, including shoplifting, resisting arrest and simple battery, related to an incident at Dillard’s in Pecanland Mall.

Bell was arrested less than one month after he completed a sentence for his role in the beating of a fellow classmate, Justin Barker, at Jena High School in 2006. The Jena Six referred to Bell and five other black students who were originally charged with beating Barker, who is white. The case eventually touched off a demonstration of thousands of supporters for the six.

Police said Bell and an unidentified male were spotted Wednesday by store security after they placed $370 worth of merchandise in a Dillard’s shopping bag. After the two separated, Bell left the store, was followed by a security officer, and began running through the parking lot, according to authorities.

Police said Bell was discovered under a vehicle in the Sears parking lot.
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The speaker of Belgium’s parliament has accepted a request from King Albert to form a new government, in an effort to break the country’s political deadlock.

Herman Van Rompuy, a Flemish Christian Democrat, is expected to maintain the existing five-party coalition of the outgoing prime minister, Yves Leterme.

Mr Leterme’s government collapsed 10 days ago, amid allegations about political meddling in a bank bail-out.

The Fortis Bank scandal comes on top of political tensions along ethnic lines.
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Add slavery to the list of Khartoum’s crimes in Darfur. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people have been enslaved in the region, the human-rights group Darfur Consortium says in a report based on interviews with escaped or released abductees, witnesses and families. The abductions by Sudanese soldiers and government-backed Arab tribesmen, the Janjaweed, are part of a wider strategy to drive civilians from non-Arabic speaking ethnic groups from their lands. The land is “then seized and repopulated by the militia and Arabic-speaking nomadic groups,” the Uganda-based group reports.

Women and girls are raped, forced into “marriages” and sexual slavery, the report says. The testimonies are difficult to bear. “They used us like wives in the night and during the day time we worked all the time,” one woman told Darfur Consortium. She was able to escape after having been abducted from a refugee camp in 2005 with 20 other people.
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The Local Government Association (LGA) has said that at at least 15 per cent of those in operational roles should be female.

That means they will fill one of the five or six places for crew on each engine.

The LGA said an increased number of firewomen is necessary “to meet the needs of local people”.

But critics warned that political correctness was being put above the ability to save lives.

Susie Squire, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said: “Introducing this sort of quota to the fire service is a big mistake.

“If ever there was a job that should be awarded on merit and physical fitness, it is that of a firefighter.
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Nicky Wagner says she has spoken to several taxi drivers and company owners since the brutal slaying of Afghan driver Abdulrahman Ikhtiari earlier this month.

“Several said they had people call who only wanted white drivers,” she said.

“You can say it’s a racist comment or say there’s a perception by the public that ethnic drivers don’t know the city as well so they end up driving longer to get to their destination.”

Wagner said the companies, who did not want to be identified, believed it was a racial issue and always told people they could not assign drivers according to their ethnicity.
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MINNEAPOLIS — Mohamud Ali Hassan once told the Somali grandmother who raised him that he’d become a doctor and care for her.
The Somali immigrant, who moved to the “Land of 10,000 Lakes” when he was 8, had good grades at the University of Minnesota and called Muslims to prayer at his mosque, where he also slept during the holy month of Ramadan.

But on Nov. 1, Hassan disappeared, as have a dozen other boys and young men here — two days after another young Muslim from Minnesota blew himself up as a suicide bomber in Somalia.

Hassan, 18, called his grandmother to say he was back in Somalia, where an Islamist militia is trying to take over the Horn of Africa nation. What he was doing there, he did not say.

Now the FBI is asking questions, as are members of the Somali community.
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When president-elect Barack Obama chose evangelical leader Rick Warren to lead a prayer at his inauguration the cultural Left threw the predictable fits. Said Kathryn Kolbert, president of People for the American Way, “this decision further elevates someone who has in recent weeks actively promoted legalized discrimination and denigrated the lives and relationships of millions of Americans,” referring to the recently passed anti-gay marriage referendum, Proposition 8 in California. Said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, “by inviting Rick Warren to your inauguration, you have tarnished the view that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans have a place at your table.” Added Democratic political consultant Chad Griffith “Rick Warren needs to realize that he is further dividing us at a time when the country needs to come together.”

In light of the Rick Warren controversy, such “coming together” rhetoric, so often mouthed by champions of “diversity” has one again proven to be a farce. For a true “coming together” of any sort on social issues, one might expect political opponents to either agree-to-disagree, yet still join and work together where they can, or for both sides to at least concede some principles as a compromise. In this case, as in most cases, the champions of diversity simply do not want an evangelical of Warren’s stripe to even be allowed a seat at the table. And while Warren hasn’t budged from his stance on gay marriage, neither will the Left anytime soon. It seems that the oft-desired “coming together” means not any new, warm embrace, but unconditional surrender, where only conservatives are always expected to wave the white flag.
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Which country is this?

It’s almost forgotten now, but, in the manner of Bombay–>Mumbai, in the middle of the 20th Century, one well-known Western European state recurrently tried to persuade Anglophones to call it by a name almost unknown in English. I recall that many maps and globes I saw as a child in the 1960s used this obscure term as the main name for this country, with its famous English name in smaller type in parentheses below.

My cousins were attending school in this country when I visited them in 1965. They complained about having to take classes in the indigenous tongue, saying that English was the language of the future. Whiny snot-nosed teens they may have been, but they were right.

Got it by now?

Emphasizing the local name over the celebrated English name was an anti-English-colonialist gesture, same as changing Bombay to Mumbai (with, same as in India, the added bonus of pleasing some locals and displeasing others). But in this case, it didn’t stick because it was too confusing and too inconvenient for foreigners, so the locals have largely given up on the name change, just as they have largely given upon the language. To this day, only this indigenous name appears on postage stamps, but the American media have largely given up using the new name and gone back to the more familiar old name.
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Psychologist Heather M. Gray from Boston University, along with Wendy Berry Mendes and Carrigan Denny-Brown of Harvard University, investigated whether the ability to detect a person’s anxiety declines when perceptions are made across the racial divide.

Although interactions with members of other racial groups are becoming increasingly more common, they are still a source of anxiety for many people. This interracial anxiety can “leak out” in the form of uncontrollable, stressful behaviors such as fidgeting and vocal tension. But how sensitive are we to signs of interracial anxiety, and does race influence the ability to detect interracial anxiety in other people? To answer these questions, the researchers videotaped White and Black participants as they performed a difficult task in front of a panel of either same-race evaluators (i.e. White participants with White evaluators) or different-race evaluators (i.e. White participants with Black evaluators). In addition, the researchers measured the participants’ cortisol (a hormone that increases when we are stressed) levels to gauge how stressed participants were. Then, a separate group of White and Black observers watched the videotapes of the participants (without seeing the evaluators) and were asked to rate the participants’ anxiety.

The results of the study, reported in the December issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that we are better able to detect anxiety in members of our own racial group than in people of different racial backgrounds.
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PC Steve Bettley, of Merseyside Police, was included in the list of the far right party’s entire membership register which was leaked on an internet blog. The officer, who was briefly the driver for chief constable Bernard Hogan Howe, has been suspended from duty since the list became public in November 2008. A Merseyside Police spokeswoman said: “Merseyside Police has completed its investigation of an officer alleged to be a member of the BNP. It has been recommended that the Police Constable face a misconduct panel. The matter is now in the hands of Merseyside Police’s solicitors for further consideration. The Constable remains suspended.” The leak provoked outrage after members of the BNP were revealed to be current and former servicemen, teachers and doctors. The list included the names, professions, addresses and telephone numbers of thousands of BNP supporters. When the list was published, BNP leader Nick Griffin pledged to take court action against those behind the leak. Dyfed-Powys Police is leading a joint investigation with the Information Commissioner’s office into the alleged breach of the Data Protection Act.
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