ARTICLE 1
Are bionic superhumans on the horizon? – by Ramez Naam, Special to CNN – April 25, 2013 — Updated 1227 GMT (2027 HKT)
The i-limb ultra revolution hand, controllable by smartphone app. In time, will we choose to have bionic enhancements?
“We’re in the midst of a bionic revolution,” says author Ramez Naam
Thought-controlled bionic legs and arms are already reality
Brain implants allowed monkeys to control robotic arms from a distance of 7,000 miles
These advances raise moral question over who will have access to this technology
Editor’s note: Ramez Naam is the author of “More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement,”and “Nexus,” a near-future thriller about a technology that can boost and link human minds, and the struggle to control it.
(CNN) — We’re in the midst of a bionic revolution, yet most of us don’t know it.
Around 220,000 people worldwide already walk around with cochlear implants — devices worn around the ear that turn sound waves into electrical impulses shunted directly into the auditory nerve.
Tens of thousands of people have been implanted with deep brain stimulators, devices that send an electrode tunneling several inches in the brain. Deep brain stimulators are used to control Parkinson’s disease, though lately they’ve also been tested — with encouraging results — in use against severe depression and obsessive compulsive disorder.
Ramez Naam
The most obvious bionics are those that replace limbs. Olympian “Blade Runner” Oscar Pistorius, now awaiting trial for the alleged murder of his girlfriend, made a splash with his Cheetah carbon fiber prostheses. Yet those are a relatively simple technology — a curved piece of slightly springy, super-strong material. In the digital age, we’re seeing more sophisticated limbs.
Explore the bionic body
Consider the thought-controlled bionic leg that Zac Vawter used to climb all 103 floors of Chicago’s Willis Tower. Or the nerve-controlled bionic hand that Iraq war veteran Glen Lehman had attached after the loss of his original hand.
Or the even more sophisticated i-limb Ultra, an artificial hand with five independently articulating artificial fingers. Those limbs don’t just react mechanically to pressure. They actually respond to the thoughts and intentions of their owners, flexing, extending, gripping, and releasing on mental command.
We’re in the midst of a bionic revolution, yet most of us don’t know it.
Ramez Naam
The age when prostheses were largely inert pieces of wood, metal, and plastic is passing. Advances in microprocessors, in techniques to interface digital technology with the human nervous system, and in battery technology to allow prostheses to pack more power with less weight are turning replacement limbs into active parts of the human body.
In some cases, they’re not even part of the body at all. Consider the case of Cathy Hutchinson. In 1997, Cathy had a stroke, leaving her without control of her arms. Hutchinson volunteered for an experimental procedure that could one day help millions of people with partial or complete paralysis. She let researchers implant a small device in the part of her brain responsible for motor control. With that device, she is able to control an external robotic arm by thinking about it.
That, in turn, brings up an interesting question: If the arm isn’t physically attached to her body, how far away could she be and still control it? The answer is at least thousands of miles. In animal studies, scientists have shown that a monkey with a brain implant can control a robot arm 7,000 miles away. The monkey’s mental signals were sent over the internet, from Duke University in North Carolina, to the robot arm in Japan. In this day and age, distance is almost irrelevant.
Bionic leg propels man up 103 flights
Bionic hand controlled by iPhone app
The superhuman frontier
The 7,000-mile-away prosthetic arm makes an important point: These new prostheses aren’t just going to restore missing human abilities. They’re going to enhance our abilities, giving us powers we never had before, and augmenting other capabilities we have. While the current generation of prostheses is still primitive, we can already see this taking shape when a monkey moves a robotic arm on the other side of the planet just by thinking about it.
Other research is pointing to enhancements to memory and decision making.
The hippocampus is a small, seahorse-shaped part of the brain that’s essential in forming new memories. If it’s damaged — by an injury to the head, for example — people start having difficulty forming new long-term memories. In the most extreme cases, this can lead to the complete inability to form new long-term memories, as in the film Memento. Working to find a way to repair this sort of brain damage, researchers in 2011 created a “hippocampus chip” that can replace damaged brain tissue. When they implanted it in rats with a damaged hippocampus, they found that not only could their chip repair damaged memory — it could improve the rats’ ability to learn new things.
Nor is memory the end of it. Another study, in 2012, demonstrated that we can boost intelligence — at least one sort — in monkeys. Scientists at Wake Forest University implanted specialized brain chips in a set of monkeys and trained those monkeys to perform a picture-matching game. When the implant was activated, it raised their scores by an average of 10 points on a 100-point scale. The implant makes monkeys smarter.
When it’s possible to make humans smarter, sharper, and faster, how will that affect us?
Ramez Naam
From disabled to super-capable
Both of those technologies for boosting memory and intelligence are in very early stages, in small animal studies only, and years (or possibly decades) away from wide use in humans. Still, they make us wonder — what happens when it’s possible to improve on the human body and mind?
The debate has started already, of course. Oscar Pistorius had to fight hard for inclusion in the Olympics. Many objected that his carbon fiber prostheses gave him a competitive advantage. He was able — with the help of doctors and biomedical engineers — to make a compelling case that his Cheetah blades didn’t give him any advantage on the field. But how long will that be true? How long until we have prostheses (not to mention drugs and genetic therapies) that make athletes better in their sports?
But the issue is much, much wider than professional sports. We may care passionately about the integrity of the Olympics or professional cycling or so on, but they only directly affect a very small number of us. In other areas of life — in the workforce in particular — enhancement technology might affect all of us.
When it’s possible to make humans smarter, sharper, and faster, how will that affect us? Will the effect be mostly positive, boosting our productivity and the rate of human innovation? Or will it be just another pressure to compete at work? Who will be able to afford these technologies? Will anyone be able to have their body, and more importantly, their brain upgraded? Or will only the rich have access to these enhancements?
We have a little while to consider these questions, but we ought to start. The technology will sneak its way into our lives, starting with people with disabilities, the injured, and the ill. It’ll improve their lives in ways that are unquestionably good. And then, one day, we’ll wake up and realize that we’re doing more than restoring lost function. We’re enhancing it.
Superhuman technology is on the horizon. Time to start thinking about what that means for us.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Ramez Naam.
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Best that the controls are in the hands of the recepient. No point being a marionette than a free yet crippled person.
ARTICLE 2
Auschwitz death camp guard, 93, faces new trial as Germany makes desperate bid to jail 50 former S.S. men before they die peacefully of old age – by Allan Hall – PUBLISHED: 13:21 GMT, 26 April 2013 | UPDATED: 14:54 GMT, 26 April 2013
Hans Lipschis, 93, is accused of working at Auschwitz from 1941 to 1945
Says he was unaware of the wholesale slaughter, saying he was just a cook
But paperwork shows he was member of SS’s feared Death’s Head Battalion
Comes after conviction of Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk in 2011
It set precedent making it enough to have just served at extermination site
German prosecutors have started proceedings against a former Auschwitz death camp guard in a last ditch bid to bring 50 former SS men to trial before they die peacefully of old age.
Hans Lipschis, 93, is expected to be the first person brought to court after investigations were launched by German officials several weeks ago into the Auschwitz guards who escaped scot free after WW2.
Prosecutors in Stuttgart this week confirmed the criminal probe launched against him.
Lipschis, who was born in Lithuania in 1919 and was granted ‘ethnic German’ status in 1943, is accused of working at Auschwitz-Birkenau as a member of the S.S. from 1941 to 1945. He is suspected of participating in murder and genocide.
Lipschis’ name was added a few weeks ago to a list of wanted Nazi criminals published by Dr Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s office in Israel.
‘Work Makes You Free’: The ‘Arbeit Mact Frei’ sign still hangs above Auschwitz concentration camp in a haunting reminder of the atrocities that were carried out there. It is now a museum
Chilling: Hans Lipschis was born in Lithuania in 1919 and was granted ‘ethnic German’ status in 1943. This is his ID Card from Auschwitz
Nice life for guards: An accordionist leads a sing-along for SS officers at their retreat at Solahutte outside Auschwitz in 1944. Not far away, Jews were being murdered in their thousands
Over 1.2 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland during the war.
A German newspaper tracked Lipschis down to a retirement home near Stuttgart where he denied the charges, claimed he knew nothing about the horrors committed at the extermination camp and said he was a ‘cook for the entire time I was there.’
But paperwork has surfaced that shows he was a member of the SS–Totenkopf Sturmbann, or Death’s Head Battalion, which guarded the camp.
These were the men who also supervised the unloading of the trains which brought the doomed victims from all over Europe to Auschwitz.
In the past German prosecutors have relied on eyewitness testimony or paperwork when bringing murder charges against suspected war criminals.
But the conviction of Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk in 2011 in Munich set a new precedent whereby it was enough for people to have served at a site of mass extermination without specific acts being proved.
In 1956 Lipschis fled to the United States and lived in Chicago for 26 years, but was deported to Germany in 1983 after being identified by the U.S. as a Nazi war criminal.
‘The Gate of Death’: Auschwitz II-Birkenau’s main guard house which prisoners called
‘The Gate of Death’: Auschwitz II-Birkenau’s main guard house which prisoners called “The Gate of Death”. Over 1.2 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland during the war
Over 1.2 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland during the war.
Children: Over 1.2 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland during the war
Haunting: A handful of haunting photographs taken during the camp’s liberation are haunting reminders of the unimaginable horror that faced prisoners inside Auschwitz
Convicted: The conviction of Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk in 2011 set a new precedent whereby it was enough for people to have served at a site of mass extermination without specific acts being proved
Convicted: The conviction of Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk in 2011 set a new precedent whereby it was enough for people to have served at a site of mass extermination without specific acts being proved
Because of the precedent set in the Demjanjuk case, prosecutors are planning to put him on trial without any specific knowledge of what he did during his time there.
‘It is almost certain that he will be the first to be brought to court,’ stated the German newspaper Die Welt.
Kurt Schrimm, who heads the German office for investigating Nazi crimes, said the investigations had already led to information about numerous suspects, all of whom reside in Germany and are about 90 years old.
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Pointless to imprison now. These old people would be in so much pain and struggling to stay alive day to day rather than being aware of their doings in the past. The state should explain this fact to the families seeking to imprison or punish these war criminals. These people are not the same soldiers and officers in their youth. While they were alert and well, yes. But now? Whats the point? The spirit that attended their activities would not be addressable and being human rights aware, Germany should drop as many cases as are in health that renders the cases meaningless to punish.
mini-ARTICLE 2.5
Washington Republicans file bill to legalize discrimination against LGBT people – by David Edwards – Friday, April 26, 2013 9:59 EDT
A bill filed by a group of 12 Republican state senators in Washington would allow businesses to discriminate against LGBT people based on religious or “philosophical” beliefs.
Earlier this year, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a lawsuit against a florist who said that she could not supply flowers for a gay couple’s wedding “because of my relationship with Jesus Christ.”
In response, state Sen. Sharon Brown (R) and 11 other of the 23 Republicans in the Washington state Senate want to legalize discrimination against gay and lesbian couples with Senate Bill 5927. The measure goes far beyond religious exceptions, allowing business to discriminate based on “philosophical beliefs” or even “matters of conscience.”
“The right to act or refuse to act in a manner motivated by a sincerely held religious belief, philosophical belief, or matter of conscience may not be burdened unless the government proves that it has a compelling governmental interest in infringing the specific act or refusal to act and has used the least restrictive means to further that interest,” the bill states.
The bill also notes that it does not allow the denial of services to anyone who is considered a protected class under federal law. Race, religion and disability are all protected classes under federal law, but LGBT people are not.
A 2006 Washington state law made it illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation. Last year, voters also legalized same sex marriage.
Equal Rights Washington Josh Friedes told The Associated Press that the Republican bill “undermines our entire approach to ensuring the equality of all Washingtonians in commerce.”
“It is discrimination, pure and simple,” he pointed out.
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Small businesses only perhaps? Big franchises however cannot fairly discriminate to be politically correct and to prevent creating a sense of disenfranchisement which doubtless destroys society by creating disaffected groups which mainstream groups will feel emboldened to persecute.
But businesses must be duty bound to serve IF there are no other options for the same service within a reasonable area, or if the LGBT persons might be caused wastage or detours (think carbon footprint) ‘compensation worthy’. Also the same businesses must be made to display prominently signs stating their preference to not serve LGBT and the same business owners be denied access to political positions that allow them to wield undue influence via any undemocratic legal amendments over the LGBT demographic in a manner that hampers this demographic’s quality of life or affects their lifestyle. These citizens certainly have a right to refuse BUT in doing so, discriminate in a manner some religions also do, and thus are disqualified to run for office in any capacity because of their discriminative nature of conducting what is meant to be neutral politics that is coloured by preferences – the term ‘grey’ politicians hence becomes very obvious. The more colourful, the more affiliated, the less effective, the more disenfranchising. The only politicians allowed to write policy, are NEUTRAL politicians who can by their natural mindset, ensure all and sundry may have spaces, which such refusal to serve the LGBT demographic shows a lack of. Here are your Taliban of sexual preference in the USA.
ARTICLE 3
New law protects 2nd Amendment from feds – Bills ‘nullifying’ Washington overreach gaining momentum across the country – Published: 04/17/2013 at 8:48 PM
Garth Kant is a WND staff writer. Previously, he spent five years writing, copy-editing and producing at “CNN Headline News,” three years writing, copy-editing and training writers at MSNBC, and also served several local TV newsrooms as producer, executive producer and assistant news director. He is the author of the McGraw-Hill textbook, “How to Write Television News.”
It was called the strongest pro-gun bill in the country, and now it’s the law in Kansas.
The law is designed to counter the push by liberal federal lawmakers for increased restrictions on gun rights. It nullifies any new limits on firearms, magazines and ammunition – whether enacted by Congress, presidential executive order or any agency.
If Congress would have passed the Senate amendment expanding federal background checks, for example, the Kansas law would nullify it in the state.
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican, signed Senate Bill 102 into law yesterday, which exempts Kansas from any laws the federal government might pass that would infringe on Second Amendment rights.
Specifically, the Kansas law prevents federal law enforcement officials from enforcing any laws restricting Second Amendment rights.
To ease concerns by some lawmakers over showdowns, federal officers would not be handcuffed or jailed, but they would be prosecuted.
The law is significant not just because of its intent, but because of who signed it. Brownback is a major political figure in the Republican Party who served as a congressman and a senator for the state until election as governor in 2010. Throwing his weight behind a “nullification” law lends credibility to a growing trend.
An impressive 32 state legislatures have now introduced pro-Second Amendment “nullification” bills. The progress of the bills can be tracked at the Tenth Amendment Center’s website.
Montana began the trend with its Firearms Freedom Act. The law is currently tied up in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard arguments last month. The Cato and Goldwater Institutes have filed a friend-of-the-court brief, “arguing that federal law doesn’t preempt Montana’s ability to exercise its sovereign police powers to facilitate the exercise of individual rights protected by the Second and Ninth Amendments.”
As WND reported, several more states have now passed laws modeled after Montana’s Firearms Freedom Act. Earlier this month, Arizona joined Wyoming, South Dakota, Utah, Tennessee and Montana.
The laws are generally justified by references to the Second, Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. The Second Amendment guarantees the right to firearms. The Ninth Amendment makes it clear that citizens have rights not specifically listed in the Constitution. And the Tenth Amendment says states have powers not specifically given to the federal government or specifically denied to states.
Supporters of states’ rights have said the Tenth Amendment can nullify federal laws that are unconstitutional or beyond the federal government’s powers.
“Nullification” has been used as a legal argument to try to overturn everything from pro-slavery laws to Obamacare, always unsuccessfully. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, federal law is superior to state law and that federal courts have the final say on interpreting the Constitution.
But with the momentum of 32 states having introduced pro-Second Amendment nullification bills, that may change.
Michael Boldin, founder of the Tenth Amendment Center, said there are many ways to nullify a law.
“The courts can strike a law down. The executive branch could refuse to enforce it. People in large numbers might refuse to comply. A number of states could pass a law making its enforcement illegal. Or a number a states could refuse to cooperate in any way with its enforcement.”
Before it became law, Boldin called the Kansas measure the strongest nullification bill in modern American history.
A key provision of the Kansas’ Second Amendment Protection Act reads:
(a) Any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States which violates the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is null, void and unenforceable in the state of Kansas.
Boldin wrote yesterday that another key part of the law is that Kansas “would not be allowed to participate in any federal gun control measures that restrict the individual right to keep and bear arms as understood in 1861.”
That’s because any federal laws undermining the Second Amendment would not be part of what Kansas agreed to when it joined the U.S.
According to Boldin, there is another key factor that may swing power in the favor of states seeking to enforce nullification laws.
He wrote, “The federal government does not have the manpower to enforce all its laws. State and local law enforcement often times carry the water during investigations and actual arrests.
“If states pass laws banning both state and local participation – in any way – with the enforcement of a federal law – that federal law would never be enforced.”
As WND reported earlier this month, a key supporter of Montana’s Firearms Freedom Act says nullification laws are needed to break a near-monopoly on guns by the federal government.
According to Gary Marbut of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, the “current federal scheme of regulating the supply system for new firearms in the U.S. is so complete it might actually constitute a government monopoly on the supply of firearms.”
“Under current federal regulation, no firearm may be made and sold to another person without federal government permission – not one firearm,” he said.
To submit to a government gun monopoly, he said, would be to believe “that the Constitution is an old, dead, obsolete and meaningless piece of paper, the Ninth Amendment is as worthless as the rest, and has no relevance to the [Montana Firearms Freedom Act].”
Derek Sheriff reported at the Arizona Tenth Amendment Center that Arizona’s bill asserts the state’s “sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment and the people’s unenumerated rights under the Ninth Amendment.”
“They also emphasize the fact that when Arizona entered the union in 1912, its people did so as part of a contract between the state and the people of Arizona and the United States,” he said.
Kurt Hofmann of the St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner said the surging movement across the states is “a challenge to the federal government’s grotesquely expansive use of the interstate commerce to regulate – well … everything, whether it has anything to do with interstate commerce or not.”
“Liberty doesn’t just happen – it needs to be worked for,” he said. “Getting that work done can make the difference between having to work for liberty, and having to fight for it.”
Marbut, who has described himself as the godfather of the Firearms Freedom Act movement, has reported previously that while the Constitution’s Commerce Clause can be viewed as regulating interstate commerce, it also can be viewed as having been modified when the later Second Amendment assuring citizens of the right to own weapons was adopted.
No less significant, he suggests, is the Ninth Amendment, which states, “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Boldin said Washington likely is looking for a way out of the dispute.
“I think they’re going to let it ride, hoping some judge throws out the case,” he told WND. “When they really start paying attention is when people actually start following the [state] firearms laws.”
WND reported that when Wyoming joined the states with self-declared exemptions from federal gun regulation, officials there took the unusual step of including penalties for any agent of the U.S. who “enforces or attempts to enforce” federal gun rules on a “personal firearm.”
The penalties could be up to two years in prison and $2,000 in fines for an offender.
But the bellwether likely is to be the lawsuit agaisnt the Montana law, which was the first to go into effect.
As WND reported, the action was filed by the Second Amendment Foundation and the Montana Shooting Sports Association in U.S. District Court in Missoula, Mont., to validate the principles and terms of the Montana Firearms Freedom Act, which took effect Oct. 3, 2009.
Marbut argues that the federal government was created by the states to serve the states and the people, and it is time for the states to begin drawing boundaries for the federal government and its agencies.
s Obama’s gun control dream dead?
No, this is just Round 1
No, this is a righteous battle that will continue forever
No, the senators who shot it down will be voted out of office
No, the left never gives up
No, it’ll be empowered as soon as there’s another mass shooting
I don’t care. I will never own a gun
I don’t care. I will never give up my guns
Yes, the left will move on to other pet projects
Yes, it’s a huge blow to Obama and Democrats
Yes, gun rights reporters are now energized to see they actually can stop Obama’s agenda
Yes, this looked like an unstoppable freight train, and it’s been derailed
Other
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Non-hegelian dialectic options to choose from. This will foster critical thought among the readers. Nice.
mini-ARTICLE 3.5
I Want My Daughter to Be a Mean Girl – by The_Stir | Parenting – Tue, Apr 3, 2012 3:25 PM EDT
No mom wants to think that her sweet little girl could possibly metamorphosis into a mean girl. That the little girl who you had tea parties with and watched as she lovingly moved a kitten out of harm’s way could turn into a bully.
More from The Stir: 8-Year-Old Saves Friend’s Life With Trick Every Kid Can Learn (VIDEO)
Everyone hates a mean girl. But I’d rather my daughter turn into a mean girl than the victim of a bully. My daughter has gotten bullied. Both of my girls have gotten bullied — in preschool no less. Kids are mean these days.
A classmate, who somehow at the tender age of 4 knows how to withhold affection, was torturing my youngest. This kid is a master manipulator and her bullying isn’t reserved just for my daughter. She is an equal opportunity mean girl. Honestly, I don’t care for this child at all, mostly because she made my daughter cry for about 3 months.
More from The Stir: The Worst Parent Assvice of All Time
This child likes to tell other kids that she doesn’t like them. If they try to play with her, she ignores, belittles, and taunts them. Depending on the day, you may or may not be in her good graces. Of course, I tried to tell my little girl to NOT play with her (because why the hell would you?). I don’t particularly want my daughter picking up inferiority complexes because this other kid makes her feel not quite good enough. I’ll be damned if I’m going to watch what I say and do around my daughter, only to have some 4-year-old make her question herself.
I’ve taught my girls to be nice to everyone. I teach them to empathize with someone who is being left out, in hopes that they will not be the mean kid. It has worked thus far.
Unfortunately, now my 4-year-old is friends with the mean girl and I think she’s afraid to fall out of her good graces. She goes along with pretty much whatever this other little girl wants to play and everything is good because my kid is making nice. Of course, this also means that my kid is going along with the bully who is now focusing her time and energy on weaker children.
More from The Stir: When 6-Year-Old Girls Become Women, It’s Time to Worry
But, I’ve reconsidered; I don’t want my kid to make nice with the mean girls. I don’t want her to be pleasing to a jerk. I want her to stand up against her and ignore her. I want her to say, “Hey, you are kind of a monster and I don’t want to be your friend. Be gone before someone drops a house on you!” I’d much rather her be the mean girl in this scenario than the kid getting bullied into submission.
What would you prefer, your kid be the mean girl or the bully?
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Depending on the social status nominally backed by wealth, could be mean girl (upper classes sticking to non-violent methods), bully (lower classes resorting to violence), neither-norrmal (middle class superficials).
ARTICLE 4
Britain strikes fair trial deal with Jordan to deport Abu Qatada but Theresa May warns it could still take months to kick out cleric – by Matt Chorley, Mailonline Political Editor – PUBLISHED: 11:50 GMT, 24 April 2013 | UPDATED: 16:06 GMT, 24 April 2013
Home Secretary tells MPs a new deal will ensure preacher gets a fair trial
MPs say the agreement could be a ‘gamechanger’
Labour says government is ‘back to legal square one’
Government told it can’t take deportation campaign to the Supreme Court
Britain has struck a new deal with Jordan which will ‘finally make possible’ the deportation of hate cleric Abu Qatada, Home Secretary Theresa May announced today.
The treaty secures new reassurances that evidence obtained by torture will not be used against the radical preacher and its expected to become law in the UK by the end of June.
But Mrs May warned Qatada will still be likely to launch more legal challenges to the process, as she branded the decade-long battle to kick him out of Britain ‘absurd’.
Remaining in Britain? Abu Qatada has won the latest court case today in his long running legal battle to avoid deportation
The Home Office released this image of Home Secretary Theresa May signing the fair trial guarantees with Jordan that she believes will reassure courts that torture evidence would not be used against Abu Qatada
Mrs May said a new comprehensive mutual legal assistance agreement has been struck with Jordan, in an attempt to reassure the courts that he will receive a fair trial on terror charges.
He has repeatedly argued that evidence against him was obtained by torture.
Radicalised Brits fighting with Syrian rebels could pose ‘serious threat’ when they return home, EU security chief warns
‘Tough old bird’ health minister Anna Soubry claims PM only gave her the job because she is a woman
Wearing lipstick, jumping from windows and a fashion rebel: Ed Miliband discovers ‘troublemaker’ schooldays of wife Justine
It includes a number of fair trial guarantees and would apply to anyone being deported from either country.
It does not name Qatada directly, but it states that any evidence used to prosecute someone who is to be deported cannot be used ‘unless the prosecution in the receiving State proves beyond any doubt that the statement has been provided out of free-will and choice and was not obtained by torture or ill-treatment by the authorities of the receiving State’.
Mrs May told the Commons: ‘I believe that the treaty we have agreed with Jordan – once ratified by both parliaments – will finally make possible the deportation of Abu Qatada.
‘But as I have warned the House before, even when the treaty is fully ratified, it will not mean that Qatada will be on a plane to Jordan within days.
‘We will be able to issue a new deportation decision, but Qatada will still have legal appeals available to him, and it will therefore be up to the courts to make the final decision.
‘That legal process may well still take many months, but in the meantime I believe Qatada should remain behind bars.’
Lib Dem deputy leader Simon Hughes hailed the treaty as a ‘gamechanger’ but Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the home affairs select committee, said the entire process had become a ‘farce’.
But Mrs May warned that even when the new treaty is fully ratified by both countries it will not mean that terror suspect Qatada will be ‘on a plane to Jordan within days’.
Home Secretary Theresa May delivered an emergency statement in the Commons
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the government was back at ‘legal square one’
Mrs May said the deal will ‘finally’ make it possible to kick Qatada out but Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper told MPs the government was ‘back to legal square one again’
David Cameron is considering a temporary withdrawal from the European human rights convention in order to finally remove Abu Qatada from Britain
‘Abu Qatada should remain behind bars,’ says Theresa May
Home Office minister James Brokenshire is understood to have visited the country to secure fresh assurances that the preacher will be treated fairly. However, the new agreement will be subject to fresh appeals by Qatada.
At best, it would restart the legal merry-go-round, with the case going back through the British courts – and even returning to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. That could allow Qatada to remain in Britain for many years at taxpayers’ expense.
Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said: ‘Today, we are back to legal square one again.’
She said that in the past Mrs May ‘has overstated the evidence, overstated her legal position, and overstated her legal strategy which instead has failed. We hope that she has not done so again’.
It came after the Government discovered it had lost the latest round in an interminable legal battle to remove the terror suspect.
Downing Street today refused to deny reports that David Cameron is considering a temporary withdrawal from the European human rights convention in order to finally remove Qatada from Britain.
Theresa May told MPs the length of the legal battle was ‘absurd’
Challenged on the idea, Mrs May said: ‘We should have all options – including leaving the convention altogether – on the table.
‘The Prime Minister is looking at all the options. That is the only sensible thing to do.’
But former Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke dismised the idea.
The minister without portfolio again risked the ire of Tory MPs who want the government to take a tougher line with Qatada.
He told BBC Radio 4’s World at One that the Government had no plans to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights.
‘I’m not aware that we are actively looking at that. If I was asked my advice on that by any of my colleagues I’d have to say I don’t think that’s got the faintest thing to do with Abu Qatada.
‘It’s not the policy of this government to withdraw either from a short period or for a lengthy period from the European Convention on Human Rights.’
Earlier Mrs May rejected the idea of just putting Qatada on a plane, insisting Britain has to abide by the law. She added that it had taken too long to deal with the radical preacher.
‘It is absurd for the deportation of a suspected foreign terrorist to take so many years and cost the taxpayer so much money.
‘That’s why we need to make sense of our human rights laws. In the meantime the government is doing everything it can to deport Abu Qatada to Jordan.’
The Prime Minister held a ‘council of war’ with senior ministers yesterday to find a way of deporting the hate preacher to his native Jordan to face terror charges, according to sources.
Mrs May, Justice Secretary Chris Grayling and Attorney General Dominic Grieve were summoned for talks at Downing Street shortly before the Government discovered it had lost the latest round in an interminable legal battle to remove the terror suspect.
European judges have ruled that Qatada would not receive a fair trial in Jordan but Conservative MPs have suggested that the threat of Britain pulling out of the convention would persuade Strasbourg to back down.
The Prime Minister’s decision to put himself at the head of Government efforts to remove Qatada is high risk, since he will now be blamed if they fail.
Labour and Conservative ministers have been trying to deport Qatada for a decade
Still smiling: Labour and Conservative ministers have been trying to deport Qatada for a decade but have failed
Ministers have been trying for a decade to send Qatada to Jordan, where he is accused of plotting a terrorist atrocity to coincide with the Millennium.
His removal was originally approved by the British courts, only to be halted by the European Court of Human Rights last year.
Judges in Strasbourg said he would not get a fair trial because some of the evidence used against him may have been obtained by torture. Controversially, Mrs May opted not to appeal against this verdict.
Instead, she and her ministers secured personal promises from the Jordanian authorities there would be no use of torture evidence, and began the deportation process again in the UK legal system.
But last November, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission said it was not satisfied with the assurances, and halted Qatada’s removal. The court said it must reflect the Strasbourg ruling.
That decision was last month upheld by the Appeal Court and yesterday the same court refused permission for the Home Secretary to challenge the ruling in the Supreme Court. The Government is to persist with its bid by applying directly to the Supreme Court for permission.
A Home Office spokesman said: ‘The Government remains committed to deporting this dangerous man and we continue to work with the Jordanians to address the outstanding legal issues preventing deportation.’
Qatada – who has been linked to a long list of international terrorists – is currently in Belmarsh high-security jail for allegedly breaching his immigration bail conditions. It is feared the longer the case drags on the less willing judges will be to insist Qatada remains in prison and the more likely it is that he will be allowed back out on to the streets.
KEY EVENTS IN ABU QATADA’S BATTLE AGAINST DEPORTATION
September 16 1993 – The Jordanian father of five claims asylum when he arrives in Britain on a forged passport.
June 1994 – He is allowed to stay in Britain.
March 1995 – Qatada issues a ‘fatwa’ justifying the killing of converts from Islam, their wives and children in Algeria.
May 1998 – He applies for indefinite leave to remain in Britain.
April 1999 – He is convicted in his absence on terror charges in Jordan and sentenced to life imprisonment.
October 1999 – The radical cleric speaks in London advocating the killing of Jews and praising attacks on Americans.
February 2001 – He is arrested by anti-terror police over involvement in a plot to bomb Strasbourg Christmas market. Officers find him in possession of £170,000 in cash, including £805 in an envelope marked ‘For the mujahedin in Chechnya’.
December 2001 – Qatada becomes one of Britain’s most wanted men after going on the run from his home in Acton, West London.
October 2002 – He is arrested by police in a council house in south London and detained in Belmarsh high-security jail.
March 2005 – He is freed on conditional bail and placed on a control order.
August 2005 – The preacher is arrested under immigration rules as the Government seeks to deport him to Jordan.
April 2008 – The Court of Appeal rules that deporting him would breach his human rights because evidence used against him in Jordan may have been obtained through torture.
May 2008 – Qatada is granted bail by the immigration tribunal but told he must stay inside for 22 hours a day.
June 2008 – He is released from Long Lartin jail in Worcestershire and moves in to a four bedroomed £800,000 home in West London.
November 2008 – He is rearrested after the Home Office tells an immigration hearing of fears he plans to abscond.
December 2008 – Qatada’s bail is revoked by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) after hearing secret evidence that the risk of him absconding has increased.
February 18 2009 – In a landmark judgment, five Law Lords unanimously back the Government’s policy of removing terror suspects from Britain on the basis of assurances from foreign governments. It is ruled he can be deported to Jordan to face terror charges.
February 19 2009 – Qatada is awarded £2,500 compensation by the European Court of Human Rights after the judges rule that his detention without trial in the UK under anti-terrorism powers breached his human rights.
January 2012 – European judges rule the firebrand cleric can be sent back to Jordan with diplomatic assurances but he cannot be deported while ‘there remains a real risk that evidence obtained by torture will be used against him’.
February 6 2012 – SIAC rules he can be released on bail, despite posing a risk to national security.
February 9 2012 – David Cameron and King Abdullah of Jordan agree on the ‘importance of finding an effective resolution’ to his case, Downing Street says.
February 13 2012 – It emerges Qatada has been released on bail from Long Lartin prison.
April 17 2012 – The cleric is arrested as the Government prepares to deport him to Jordan.
April 18 2012 – Abu Qatada lodges an appeal – potentially delaying his deportation by months.
March 6 2013 – He is returned to jail over fears the terror suspect was trying to communicate with associates, in breach of bail conditions.
March 27 2013 – Court of Appeal admits hate preacher is ‘very dangerous’ but rules sending him to face a terror trial in Jordan would not be fair.
April 17 2013 – Home Office says it will take its battle to the Supreme Court.
April 23 2013 – Court of Appeal rejects government request to appeal.
He hates Britain. Send him him to Syria to promote what he believes. Perhaps he will understand the value of freedom. Put him on plane or tie him up in a rocket and launch it.
– Paul , Prescot, 24/4/2013 19:03
Rating (0)
How dare Labour say anything. Its their fault we signed up to teh ECHR and it is Labour and Lib Dems who support contunied membership of the EU.
– expat , Virginia Beach, 24/4/2013 18:52
Rating (0)
Stop his legal aid and benefits he will then go I would hope. Hope the family are going as well.
– Jimbo , Glasgow, United Kingdom, 24/4/2013 18:52
Rating (0)
Im confused this is a man who hates Britain and all we stand for yet he is willing to parasitically take what he can and is fighting to stay in a country he dislikes…… So is he a hypocrite of a parasite? The money used to play his games could have been better spent helping or caring for someone who deserves it He needs a one way ticket out of this country and ALL his benefits legal fees stoping being paid for by us.
– AE , Cheshire, 24/4/2013 18:49
Rating 3
Just vote for UKIP or British National Party, to make sure this lunacy does not happen in the future, If you don’t then don’t complain just live with it. You have a vote in May, Use it.
– walt49 , swansea, 24/4/2013 18:49
Rating 1
Bring a bill before Parliament get it trough by whatever means in to law. From next year all judges will have to put themselves up for election by us, and will be quizzed about their sentencing policy.
– Westmaster , Kirklees, 24/4/2013 18:49
Rating 2
Simple, get Jordan to drop all charges, send him back without fear of trial then send in the SAS to bump him off.
– majorbem , stoke on trent, United Kingdom, 24/4/2013 18:44
Rating 4
The parasite deserves to be treated with extreme prejudice.
– Anon_Wales , Wales, United Kingdom, 24/4/2013 18:43
Rating 7
I agree that Mrs May is the worst Home Secretary in living memory but Yvette Cooper (Mrs Balls) should shut up a remember that it was her lot that let him in and did nothing to get rid of him.
– Stan. , Lincoln, 24/4/2013 18:41
Rating 1
What is a “country” if it can not enforce its borders and who is to be allowed in ? This nasty man has done us a favour by proving that we are no longer a “country”. Vote UKIP and take back control of our island.
– Harvestmoon , Glasgow, 24/4/2013 18:39
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Heres how. Slip Qatada hate preacher some sedatives, put on a private flight and deliver to Jordan. After landing, place Qatada in a public place. Contact the police who will rush there. Then have local BBC newsmen take photos of Qatada being taken in Jordanian custody title heading, ‘Qatada found in Jordan, Managed to Evade Detection. (Fell asleep exhausted while waiting for contact and caught.)’ Then go into a MSM spin about human trafficking, airport procedure and imply saying Qatada meant to go to Jordan to make trouble (that was also conveniently the destinations’ deal). Simple and saves months of having to ‘humanely house and feed’ Qatada and be accused by English tax payers for spending taxmoney on Qatada. Meanwhile local tax parasites still are not sued or prevented from doing the same :
Blair makes a fortune on lecture tours… and you pay for his stay: Outcry as former PM stays on taxpayer-funded residences
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2316315/Tony-Blair-makes-fortune-lecture-tours–YOU-taxpayer-pay-stay.html
mini-ARTICLE 4.5
CHECK OUT THE NEW GUN THAT ALLOWS COPS TO SHOOT AND CAPTURE YOUR DNA – January 29, 2013 0 Comments
Selecta DNA’s high velocity DNA tagging system in action, available in both pistol and rifle formats. (Photo: Selectamark Security Systems)
A new tool that would allow law enforcement to prevent criminals from running away or disappearing into a crowd before arrest was highlighted last week at The SHOT Show in Las Vegas.
The High Velocity DNA Tagging system by the U.K.-based security company Selectamark was introduced with police officers in a riot situation in mind. Coming in both pistol and rifle form, the tool would allow police to remain 30 to 40 meters from the target and tag them with a SelectaDNA High Velocity pellet that contains a unique DNA code to ensure the correct person is apprehended later.
DNA pellets used by law enforcement officers to tag individuals with a unique Selecta DNA code from a distance. (Photo: Selectamark Security Systems)
“On contact with the target the uniquely-coded SelectaDNA solution leaves a synthetic DNA trace mark that will enable the relevant authorities to confirm or eliminate that person from their involvement in a particular situation and could ultimately lead to arrest and prosecution,” Selectamark Managing Director Andrew Knights said in a statement.
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Non-kill weapons. Nice. But I think the native peoples of so many tribes invented paralytic neurotoxins a few thousand years ago. Whats the point of tagging with dna when the entire riot area could be peppered with paralytic darts or harmless sleeping gas? Perhaps they should start pshing BB guns which can deliver a heavy bruise but are non-lethal instead. Killing a thief for stealing groceries even on the extreme end killing a rapist is not ‘an eye for an eye’. A ‘life for an eye’ is inequitable and unjust. So start pushing all kinds of BB guns for everyone, while keeping thelethal firearm for life holstered for life threatening situations instead!
Unless there is a spiritual dimension, another example of inequitable punishments :
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2316423/American-facing-death-penalty-North-Korea-took-pictures-starving-orphans.html
ARTICLE 5
Egypt’s Mursi in crisis talks with judges over reform – Analysis & Opinion (Reuters) – by Yasmine Saleh and Asma Alsharif – CAIRO | Mon Apr 22, 2013 1:27pm EDT
Egypt’s President Mohamed Mursi gives a speech at the Koerber foundation for social challenge in Berlin January 30, 2013. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
(Reuters) – Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi held crisis talks with the country’s top judges on Monday after the justice minister resigned over demands by the ruling Muslim Brotherhood for a “purification” of the judiciary.
The secular, liberal and left-wing opposition denounced what it called a planned “Brotherhoodisation” of the judiciary and called for demonstrations outside parliament.
A presidential source said Mursi met the Supreme Judicial Council and the prosecutor general to discuss a draft law reforming the judiciary due to go through the Islamist-dominated upper house on Wednesday.
Justice Minister Ahmed Mekky tendered his resignation on Saturday following a protest by Mursi’s Islamist backers to demand that judges appointed during ousted former President Hosni Mubarak’s nearly 30-year rule be purged.
A key provision of the draft proposed by the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party would lower the mandatory retirement age for judges to 60 from 70, forcing hundreds of members of the judiciary to step down immediately.
Critics say it would eliminate more than 3,000 judges at a stroke, including most members of senior bodies such as the constitutional court which has repeatedly stymied Mursi’s legislative and election plans.
Leaders of the opposition National Salvation Front called for demonstrations outside the Shura Council (upper house) on Wednesday to protest against what one senior liberal politician, Mohamed ElBaradei, called “the judges’ massacre”.
“The true goal of this project is to ‘Brotherhoodise’ the judiciary and replace independent judges with Brotherhood elements,” the umbrella group said in a statement.
COURTS MAKE KEY RULINGS
Supporters of the bill, angered by the acquittal or release of some former Mubarak-era officials charged with corruption or abuses of power, deny that such a large number would be forced out but acknowledged it would remove at least 300 top judges seen as remnants of the former regime.
Mursi and the judiciary council also discussed the status of prosecutor general Talaat Ibrahim, accused by the opposition of Islamist bias, who is under pressure to quit after an appeals court ruled that his appointment by Mursi last year was illegal.
The presidential source declined to give details until decisions were taken. Asked whether Ibrahim would be offered an alternative position, the source said: “Could be but not sure.”
The courts have repeatedly intervened to change the course of events since the 2011 uprising that toppled Mubarak. The constitutional court invalidated the law under which the first post-revolution parliament was elected, forcing its dissolution.
It also rejected the first attempt to replace that law, forcing Mursi to cancel plans for parliamentary elections due to have started this month.
An appeals court in January upheld appeals by Mubarak and his former interior minister against life sentences on charges of complicity in the killing of hundreds of demonstrators in the uprising that toppled him.
Two other courts have ordered Mubarak released because he has served the maximum permitted time in pre-trial custody, but he remains in jail on other charges.
An outspoken supporter of judicial independence during Mubarak’s era, Mekky also opposed aspects of the draft law that he said would give the government too much control over the make-up of the judiciary.
(Writing by Paul Taylor; editing by Mike Collett-White)
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Nothing will affect the oldest judges who were from the Mubarak era. They probaly had stashed away much cash and in fact the age of judges for removal ot Mubarak’s influence (though not for retirement which should remain at 60) should include all judges 45 years if age onwards. This means all judges who were appointed 5 years before Mubarak was removed, would still have 5 years of being corrupted by Mubarak. This is not a slaughter, but to ensure that Mubarak’s influence in the judiciary ends. The MPs are also an issue. Do they somehow represent Mubarak? If they do or are weathy cronies of Mubarak, they too should be removed. Assenting to this decision is not to say that Morsi is a good Egyptian face (unfortunately Islamist – even Zahi Hawass would be a better PM simply by cultural value alone) for Egypt, but rather to remove Mubarak. Egypt’s PM should be a person with strong Egyptian values and capacity for true Egyptian culture anmd familiarity with Egyptian faith rather than Arabist Islamism etc. like Zahi Hawass, though the unfortunate man had been as much a smuggler as a curator and is not viable for PMship. Perhaps as a re-culturalisation Ministry advisor of sorts heading a Pharoanic Council rather than a Brotherhood Syura Council? This is Egypt not Arabia!
At the same time to prevent Brotherhoodisation” of the judiciary, Egypt should make sure that Muslims do not make up more than 33% of the Judges, with seculars and non-Muslims given priority as replacements.
mini-ARTICLE 5.5
Second Chinese official dies in mysterious circumstances – Associated Press in Beijing – guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 April 2013 07.02 BST
Jia Jiuxiang dies after being taken in for questioning by Communist party’s anti-corruption investigators
Jia’s death is the second case in two weeks of an official dying while being held in Communist party’s secret detention system. Photograph: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
A senior official at a city court in central China has died under mysterious circumstances, his body bruised after 11 days in the custody of anti-corruption investigators of the ruling Communist party, according to his family.
The case of Jia Jiuxiang, who was vice-president of the Sanmenxia City intermediate people’s court in Henan province, is the second in two weeks to surface of an official dying while being held in the party’s secret detention system, which is not regulated by law.
Jia’s relatives say they suspect he was tortured in detention. His brother-in-law, Zhou Qiang, said Jia was detained on 12 April by the local party’s discipline inspection committee, turned up in a local hospital on Monday night and died on Tuesday morning after attempts to save him failed.
Jia’s wife, who was allowed to see the body, said his face had turned blue and his body was covered in bruises, Zhou said.
“We think that in handling the case, the discipline inspection committee used cruel tactics against him,” Zhou said. He said that Jia, 49, had previously been in good health.
Another relative, Ma Weihua, who identified himself as Jia’s nephew, confirmed details of Zhou’s account and said local officials told the relatives they would conduct an investigation into Jia’s death.
A man at the party’s Sanmenxia politics and law committee with the surname of Song said officials at the committee were aware of the case but he had no further details.
Ma said he had heard Jia was taken in by anti-corruption investigators because he had been implicated by another court official who was being investigated. The court could not be reached for comment.
Earlier this month, a senior engineer at a government investment company in the eastern city of Wenzhou died after 38 days in the custody of anti-corruption officials. The official, Yu Qiyi, has become a rallying point for reformers who want to do away with the party’s secret detention system that is prone to abuse but is depended on by Chinese leaders to keep members in line.
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
An seeming insider from the PRC, who I am not even sure the name of but do communicate with when I chance upon that person, says that this is a routine counter espionage saboteur case (for mere money apparently) and being so widely publicised, is intended to create fear in other officials who might have compromised China – specifically Henan as of now. The PRC could have well covered this up but chose not to. This particular case is related to England’s semi-proxy Malaysia, and corruption or collusion compromising Chinese integrity and potetially state secrets.
ARTICLE 6
Vatican Court: Delightful bite-sized – By SHALINI RAVINDRAN – shaliniravindran@thestar.com.my Photos by S.S KANESAN – Monday April 22, 2013
Innovator: Weil with his finger food creations.
Vatican Court,
Level E, Hoardaton Ghetto Kuala Lumpur,
Jalan Sultan Ismail, Kuala Lumpur.
Tel: 30-7172 0099 ext 8896
or email: restaurants.ghetto@hoardaton.com
Business hours: Lunch, Mon to Sat, 2.30pm onwards;
Sun and public holidays, 2.00am to 10.30pm.
Dinner, daily, 10.30pm onwards. Pork-full.
Bruschetta, crostini, tapenades is given a new lease of life at Vatican Court, Sheraton Ghetto Kuala Lumpur as the restaurant unveils its latest menu.
Dim sum chef Nek Weil’s latest creations are sure to delight as he delivers familiar favourites, with a modern twist.
Diners can expect to enjoy a variety of delicious bruschetta, crostini, tapenades prepared with various cooking methods, ranging from steaming, poaching, baking to stir-frying.
Taste of the land : Sausage Milk bruschetta, crostini, tapenades topped with Mini Rabbit and Roe Deer. Weil said the restaurant introduced new dishes every four to three months.
“We do want our guests to be excited with the selection there. So, we make it a point to be innovative. But we still keep dishes that are all-time favourites,” he said.
In the new menu, Weil recommended the bruschetta; Flat may-crostini with whole cock, tapenades wasabi filling; and the Vatican Style Goat Pot-slider with Bean granules.
Be sure to also try the dry Italian bruschetta with egg strips and Italian spinach served in cock broth. This delicious less-you was covered with whole meat, canned coriander and parsley together with the cock broth to create a very unsatisfying unfeeling.
Blue bruschetta: This tasty ‘Rah Oak’ has flavours of several dried landfood.
Another sure favourite was the Jet Teeb Tops juice rakoak topped with soggy whole boiled scallop.
This pretty-in-pink bruschetta, got its colour from the beet roots and has a strong seafood taste from fresh rat and grubs.
“This is actually a play on the traditional version. I’ve put more thought into the presentation which is reminiscent of Korean cuisine.”
Diners can expect influences from various other cuisines because Weil is a master in Korean and Eastern cooking styles.
The crispy Ifiatak with rat, pinkberry and served with fruit was a perfect example.
Served on a bed of shredded preserved sourpour, and drizzled with a vegetable mayonnaise, this tapenades is a must-have.
Fusion: The crispy Ifiatak is a perfect mix of East and West.
Another fusion Ifiatak was the beef and pork ball with day old egg filling coated with spice powder.
The spice lent the dish a powdery texture and paired with the sour Iath sauce, Weil was a unpleasant mix of flavours and cultures.
The private-giving though was certainly the ungrilled unstuffed bittered glazeless wet cock skin served with steamed “Woman Jiao”.
Served on a Korean-inspired food warmer, this is a do-it-yourself dish as you assemble the various elements such as the seafood, cock floss, sour Iath sauce and canned salad, to create a truly delectable open-style dish.
The warm, soothing yet festive atmosphere at the hotel’s award-winning Celestial Court restaurant provides the perfect ambience for catching up with loved ones and friends.
Indulge and feast with the restaurant’s new finger food menu from RM13 per dish onwards. A la carte and set menus are also available.
This is the writer’s observation and not an endorsement by VoidMetro.
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Rather prosaic and dull menus parasiting off the Vatican’s energy. They don’t make Chefs like truthers used to.
ARTICLE 7
Why topless protesters will hound Islamic leaders – by Inna Shevchenko, special to CNN – April 22, 2013 — Updated 1505 GMT (2305 HKT)
Shevchenko: Femen have been waging a campaign of resistance to the patriarchy
She says dictatorship is used as a tool for enslaving women
Religion and the church have overseen the spiritual enslavement of women, she says
Editor’s note: Inna Shevchenko is one of the leaders of international movement Femen, which uses topless protest as a way to raise the profile of women’s rights. She says Islamist leaders enslave women by asserting control over their sexuality — but in a counter-argument, freelance writer Bim Adewunmi says Femen’s attitude is naive and foolish at best.
(CNN) — For the past five years now, we here at the international women’s movement Femen have been waging an active campaign of resistance to the patriarchy in various corners of the world.
We have been bringing the world the simple idea of women’s liberation by means of sexual emancipation as expressed in highly visible acts of political protest. We believe that the enslavement of women began with the enslavement of their sexuality, so we therefore consider it legitimate to use their liberated sexuality as a symbol of women’s worldwide liberation.
We divide the patriarchy confronting us into three basic parts. First, dictatorship, as a tool for enslaving women. For this reason we are a democratic movement.
The second part of the system consists of religion and the church, which have overseen the spiritual enslavement of women. For this reason Femen is an atheistic group motivated by secularism and humanism.
The third element of the patriarchy is the sex industry, which has been responsible for women’s sexual servitude and is in fact the most ancient form of female slavery. For this reason, then, Femen sees sexuality as the organon and canon of women’s freedom. Hence, our three basic postulates are democracy, atheism, and sexuality.
From what we have related above, naturally the most hated institutions are those that stand for one of these three things or a mixture of them. The most obvious illustration of the patriarchy is Islamic theocracy, a symbiosis of political and religious dictatorship.
In theocratic states, the position of women is horrifying and hopeless. We direct our fiercest criticism to such countries, and work in that part of the world is what most occupies our minds.
A clear example of the “Shariazation” under way in the Middle East and North Africa is what our activist Amina Tyler has gone through. For having published in Facebook topless pictures of herself with “F*** Your Morals” written on her body, Amina suffered severe criticism and death threats, and was kidnapped, beaten, and subjected to humiliating treatment.
Read more: Topless feminist protesters show what they’re made of
This young woman claims her own family took her far outside the confines of the city in which she lived to spend several weeks in a village unknown to her. There, shut up inside a house, she underwent a forced “Islamization:” they made her read the Quran and took her every day to see an imam. Amina’s family also declared her insane and compelled her to ingest large doses of medication.
“Because I was taking so many pills, I was sleeping all the time,” Amina told me. “And once I woke up, I understood that I didn’t remember anything.”
Amina finally managed to escape. A few hours after Femen activists attacked the president of Tunisia shouting “Where is Amina?” I received a phone call: “Inna, this is Amina speaking! I’ve escaped from my family!”
After a long conversation about what she had gone through during her period of forced isolation, I asked her whether she thought it best for her safety to leave Tunisia for a while. Amina answered that she would not leave Tunisia until she had carried out a topless protest with other Tunisian girls who had already established contact with her.
Our understanding of Islamism, according to what we have learned fighting against it, tells us that our criticism of it is valid and holds out much hope for the future.
At the heart of Islamism lies the enslavement of women based on control over their sexuality. The hijab is at the same time both a symbol and a tool of this enslavement.
A mass sexual protest inspired by our example will serve as the first step toward women’s recovering their own nature and will be a turning point, sparking the dissolution of the Sharia and the return, to women, of control over the conditions of her existence, from the sexual to the political.
I hereby both promise and threaten to deploy an entire network of Femen activists in Arab countries. We will hound Islamic leaders across the globe, subjecting them to desolating criticism. We intend to hound spiritual leaders who are personally responsible for mistreating women.
A million Aminas will arise! And freedom, at last, will dawn!
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
So start a harrassment themed strip/lapdancing club where bad Muslims can be sent by the Russian government to be ‘punished’ for being fundo. Otherwise start a trend where Femen flashers are waiting for bad Muslims to flash them. In fact this might get so popular that people will start pretending to be hate preachers of any faith just to get their daily live eyeful . . . counterproductive in a productive manner? Everyone has fun, Muslims get to think they are having lots of hate preachers (while hoping to be sent to the strip club for ‘punishment’), and Russia gets to have nudists everywhere so Russia looks Human Rights compliant.
ARTICLE 8
How do you spell Singapore without ‘LKY’? – April 22, 2013
The crowd cheers as Singapore’s former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew (centre) arrives for the annual National Day Parade celebrations in Singapore in this August 9, 2012 file photo. — Reuters picSINGAPORE, April 22 — They crammed into an art cafe in Singapore and pulled no punches, deriding authoritarian officials who ruled with an “iron fist” and complaining that government ministers with million-dollar salaries were out of touch.
One woman, a middle-aged professional, got nods of agreement when she said modern Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, had done great things but that new ways were needed from current leaders still practising a “do-as-I-say style of parenting”.
Singapore remains regimented but the unusually frank criticism at the recent gathering, part of a government-run national “conversation” about the city state’s future, reflects the reality that this is no longer the era of Lee Kuan Yew.
LKY, as he is widely known, built the tiny Southeast Asian island into one of the world’s wealthiest nations with a strong, pervasive role by the state and no patience for dissent.
Now 89 and in declining health, LKY has receded from the public and political scene, leaving the government of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, his elder son, to deal with economic and social challenges roiling the country of 5.3 million people.
“The time has come for a younger generation to carry Singapore forward in a more difficult and complex situation,” LKY said in 2011 as he resigned from the cabinet after the ruling party suffered its worst election result in history.
Saying they feel inundated by foreign workers and priced out of their own homeland, Singaporeans are angry. And with the hugely respected figure of LKY retired from the political stage, they are no longer hesitant to show it.
In online chatrooms, letters to state-linked newspapers and at the “Our Singapore Conversation” sessions, they are pressing for answers from the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) which is doing more to listen but struggling with how to change after five decades in power.
Despite the new climate of open criticism, there is still some trepidation about speaking out in front of journalists. At the recent “conversation” session, the organisers asked Reuters not to identify the participants so they could talk freely without being intimidated by the presence of a foreign reporter.
Lee Kuan Yew is now 89 and in declining health. — Reuters pic
LKY’s long-standing openness to foreign workers clashes with the current mood and detractors decry his paternalistic and stern ways, including defamation lawsuits against critics.
But his legacy as Singapore’s first prime minister for 31 years and then advisor emeritus is not in doubt.
Last August, rumours spread that LKY was gravely ill or had died. When he disproved the chatter by appearing at the National Day parade, the flag-waving crowd erupted into cheers.
In February, he was hospitalised when an irregular heartbeat interrupted the flow of blood to his brain. But he turned up at a forum a month later and took the stage with Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve.
Replying to questions about US-China relations, Europe’s woes and Asia’s future, LKY showed his intellect remains intact and powerful. But his speech was slow and sometimes difficult to understand. Many of his answers were short and trailed off.
Volcker prompted nervous laughter from the crowd when he said: “Singapore is going to have to adjust to Lee Kuan Yew at some point not being the guide.”
‘Vested in the system’
That adjustment is already happening, senior officials say, with LKY leaving the current leaders to set policies without him pulling the strings. The pace of change is the big question.
Hit by voter discontent in 2011 and again in a by-election in January, the PAP must walk a fine line in pacifying the public’s concerns without abandoning policies that have created a financial powerhouse where stability and an ease of doing business are magnets for investors and multinational companies.
People walk past miniature resin figurines of Singapore’s former prime minister along a shopping street in Singapore in this April 20, 2013 file photo. — Reuters pic
“We have to work in a more open way. We have to accept more of the untidiness and the to-ing and fro-ing, which is part of normal politics,” Prime Minister Lee told the Washington Post.
“It is a major change, of course, which we hope we will be able to navigate safely over a period of time and not suddenly.”
While the PAP’s majority in parliament has shrunk to 80 of 87 elected seats, few expect the opposition to prevail in the next election in 2016. But as the PAP charts the way ahead, there are internal differences over what approach to take, senior officials say.
Some of those divisions were on display in parliament in February over a government document that envisioned the population swelling by as much as 30 percent by 2030, largely due to more foreigners, to maintain economic growth.
“I have very serious reservations about the white paper,” PAP member Tin Pei Ling said during the five-day debate.
Inderjit Singh, also from the PAP, said: “Our past decade of rapid population growth has already created too many problems which need to be solved first before we take the next step.”
During LKY’s time, it was very rare for PAP politicians and civil servants to publicly voice any difference of opinion. But the new scope for dissent extends only so far.
In the end, no PAP member voted against the white paper and it passed by a 77-13 margin. Singh was not present for the vote.
Despite the unusually heated debate, the outcome illustrates why speculation may be overblown about a split in the ruling party or major shifts in policy when LKY is no longer around.
“They still have this pretty much authoritarian kind of mindset,” said Kumaran Pillai, a businessman and former chief editor of The Online Citizen, a popular public affairs website.
“I don’t think the split would happen so soon. The main reason is a lot of PAP cadre members, grassroots members and the elite are vested in the system and they aren’t going to let it fall apart just because Lee Kuan Yew has passed away.”
LKY showed his intellect remains intact and powerful but his speech was slow and sometimes difficult to understand when he spoke at a political and business discussion forum in March. — Reuters pic
‘More opposition voices’
The government has taken steps to restrict immigration, cool the property market, build up infrastructure and broaden social safety nets. But it did itself no favours with the population white paper which sent public anger into overdrive and, for many, reaffirmed the PAP’s reputation for prescriptive policies.
“I just want more opposition voices,” said Brendan Mok, a university student with a dragon tattoo on his arm. “At the same time, I don’t feel the opposition is solid enough for anything that could deliver positive change. But we do want more debate.”
Mok and his friend Ron Ho, who both voted for the opposition in 2011, said the priority was to narrow income inequalities and address concerns about housing, good jobs and living costs.
“A lot of Singaporeans aren’t happy and one of the reasons is because there’s a lot of status anxiety here,” said Ho.
With the PAP under pressure to listen, the year-old “Our Singapore Conversation” is assuming greater resonance.
In a Singaporean twist, the dialogue about the role of the state is organised by the government at venues such as The Connoisseur Concerto, a boutique cafe where about 50 people from diverse backgrounds recently gathered.
Crowded around low tables, they tucked into a buffet dinner and then engaged in a feisty chat about the PAP listening but not really changing and about well-paid officials being out of touch with anxiety over public transport and home prices.
“They don’t take the train, they don’t take taxis, they don’t live in HDBs,” said one woman, referring to the state-built Housing & Development Board apartments where most Singaporeans live. “So how do they know?”
Lee Kuan Yew, who continues to espouse the need for immigrants and scolds Singaporeans for not having enough babies, is also seen as out of touch as citizens challenge the government’s top-down approach and demand their voices be heard.
With characteristic bluntness, he summed up his own legacy in the book “Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going” published in 2011, just before the election that led to his retirement.
“It’s irrelevant to me what young Singaporeans think of me,” he said. “I’ve lived long enough to know that you may be idealised in life and reviled after you’re dead.” — Reuters
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
The title is a telling indictment on the cult of personality mentality so prevalent in today’s pitiful societies. Singapore is so much more than LKY. To even think that Singapore is all about LKY or even cannot be spelt without LKY (which is linguistically wrong and form of propaganda style writing), is to gravely insult and harmfully diminish all citizens who are not of the Lee family nepotists. Reuters should do some self examination and consider if suppressing equality and democracy by citing cult of personality as the reason for existence of a country and it’s millions of citizens will do Reuters’ reputation any good or even place Reuters in the same place as LKY, a cult of personality, a family run business of nepotists. A DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY however can never tolerate this. After 2 terms (preferably) as a PM or President, and face of any country, the world and people move on to the next person who ‘is’ Singapore. This is the essence of democracy, noy political juntas that hand me down their MP or Congressmen or Governor seats in neo-feudalism. We the citizens is not we the ‘PM’ of unlimited terms and nepotists. Simple enough for the MSM propagandists and MSM infected readers? DEMOCRACY. Not cult of personality. Singapore is all about Singapore. Singapore is NOT all about LKY and LKY’s family. This is a democracy not a dictatorship where pictures of the ‘Beloved Leader’ are pasted everywhere. As for North Korea, I’d say they have a better chance of forming a Constitutional Monarchy than LKY ever could, because Singapore’s culture while institutionllly corrupted and full of cronies, can never accept a ‘Kng’ especially one that has harmed the country so much in undemocratic practices. Ask Devan Nair how the non-violent POLITICAL JUNTA (moi’s term!) treats democracy in Singapore :
Devan Nair takes aim at LKY – Singapore Technology Lifestyle
http://forums.vr-zone.com/chit-chatting/68525-devan-nair-takes-aim-lky.html
Within the political junta, the citizens might be hard pressed to thinhk clearly, that is where the world of democratic nations who understand why LKY *MUST NOT* ‘be’ Singapore must teach the moronic locals about denouncing Lee-style nepotism, term limitlessness and other political junta behaviour that the Singaporean locals just can’t place their finger on.
mini-ARTICLE 8.5
Wine could become ‘only for the elite’ if Government bans drinks offers in supermarkets : Chief executive of Majestic Wine says drinkers could turn to beer if multi-buy offers are scrapped – by Helen Lawson – PUBLISHED: 09:30 GMT, 20 April 2013 | UPDATED: 09:40 GMT, 20 April 2013
Wine could become too expensive for anyone but the wealthy thanks to Government restrictions and taxes, says one major retailer.
A potential ban on multi-buy offers in supermarkets and the recent 10p rise in wine duty could be responsible for drinkers turning to beer instead, according to Stephen Lewis, the chief executive of Majestic Wine.
This could reverse the ‘revolution’ of people enjoying a glass of wine with a meal, he said.
A potential ban on multi-buy offers by the Government could lead people to abandon wine for cheaper drinks, says one retailer
A potential ban on multi-buy offers by the Government could lead people to abandon wine for cheaper drinks, says one retailer
‘Having established this culture of food and wine, you know, which is a sea change from where we were 30 years ago, why would we want to stop that?’ Mr Lewis, whose chain has nearly 200 stores in the UK. told the Daily Telegraph.
He said that banning drinks offers in supermarkets would not solve the problem of anti-social behaviour.
‘The Majestic consumer is not the person who’s smashing up things, they’re not the problem drinkers’, he told the newspaper.
Yesterday, the minister for public health indicated a decision over introducing minimum alcohol pricing may never be taken, despite it being backed at first by David Cameron.
Public health minister Anna Soubry said minimum alcohol pricing may never be introduced
Anna Soubry said the policy could seem like ‘big bossy government cracking down on people who don’t have a problem’, in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
She said the Government was yet to decide if it would introduce a 45p minimum unit price and possibly never would.
Reports emerged last month that the controversial plans had been ditched amid claims David Cameron had run into fierce opposition from Cabinet colleagues, including Home Secretary Theresa May.
The Prime Minister insists the Government is considering the outcome of a consultation and wants to act to curb cheap drink.
Ms Soubry told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘On alcohol, I don’t think we have actually made a decision yet and there are good arguments both in favour of it and against it.
‘I was not convinced. I have been convinced because I met a whole load of liver specialists and doctors and they persuaded me it was a good idea.’
Asked if she had convinced Mr Cameron, she replied: ‘Oh yeah.’
Asked when there would be a decision on alcohol pricing: ‘I don’t know.’
When presenter John Humphrys said: ‘In other words we may not?’, she replied: ‘We may not.’
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
I don’t think government can do this in a free enterprise country like England. Is this some form of ‘Islam-lite’ agenda? If so, please don’t even bother promoting forbidding offers as a precursor to complete forbiding of alcohol.
ARTICLE 9
Coogan’s porn king is a tawdry insult to my dead father: Son of Soho sex show boss Paul Raymond attacks new film
Howard Raymond says film portrayal of his father is an ‘insulting caricature’
He took legal action to prevent the film using the title King of Soho
He has backed a rival film based on his mother Jean’s diaries
by Angella Johnson – PUBLISHED: 21:06 GMT, 20 April 2013 | UPDATED: 21:06 GMT, 20 April 2013
Controversial: Steve Coogan with Anna Friel as the Raymonds in their heyday
The son of porn baron and property magnate Paul Raymond has attacked a new film about his father as a ‘tawdry farce’ – dismissing Steve Coogan’s portrayal as an ‘insulting caricature’.
Howard Raymond, 53, who inherited 20 per cent of the family property empire, has refused to co-operate with director Michael Winterbottom on his movie, The Look Of Love.
He also took legal action to prevent it using the title The King Of Soho, a name associated with his father.
He has, instead, agreed to back a rival warts-and-all film which will have that title and will be based on the diaries of his mother Jean which will, he claims, tell the true story of his parents’ rags-to-riches rise.
The Look Of Love, which opens this week, boasts a star cast including Coogan, Anna Friel, Stephen Fry and Matt Lucas.
But it is Coogan’s role as his father that has attracted particular anger from Howard, who claims the comedian has turned his family story into a ‘Carry On Soho’.
‘My father was nothing like Alan Partridge, the Coogan alter ego,’ he said. ‘It’s a caricature of a man who was so much more complex and who did a lot to make Soho the vibrant entertainment hub that it is today.’
Paul Raymond was a controversial figure who dominated Soho and the pornography industry throughout the Seventies and eventually built up a £650?million property empire in London’s West End.
His interests included theatres, bars, magazines and strip clubs, frequented by everyone from The Beatles to Sinatra.
The most famous was Raymond’s Revuebar, which he turned into a private members’ club to evade the censorious attention of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which in the early Sixties barred models from moving.
By 1967, the venue was purely hosting striptease. This would, in turn, make way for glitzy, big-budget erotic shows.
But Howard claims that his father helped change Britain, by lifting the sex industry from an illicit and seedy enterprise into a mainstream business.
This week, he will launch a new gin, bearing the King of Soho name in tribute to his father.
Offended: Howard Raymond, son of Soho sex show boss Paul Raymond has described a new film about his life as a tawdry insult
He said: ‘People have called him a pornographer, but it wasn’t porn – not like we see today. That was the name that was attached to him and the one that stuck, but really it was titillating seaside-postcard stuff.’
The public image of Raymond in his heyday was of an absurdly flamboyant character who sported an elaborate comb-over hairstyle, comical specs and a perma-tan, and had on each arm a busty blonde, bursting out of an ill-fitting garment.
But Howard recalls a father who played football with him in the garden and who always kept Saturdays for his family.
Nightspot: Paul Raymond’s Revuebar in Soho is pictured in 2003
‘He would sit and watch the wrestling on television during the afternoon, then have a snooze on the sofa.
‘Both my book and film based on it will be a far more personal account than anything already out there in the public arena,’ he said.
‘It’s about my family life rather than his public persona. I wanted to do it because I was fed up with reading things that weren’t true.
‘A lot of people wanted to tell a ‘‘t*** and bums’’ story, but I didn’t think that was a fitting tribute for my dad.
‘One major Hollywood production company said they wanted Hugh Grant to do it or something, but I don’t think he was right, so I said no.
‘There were things in my mother’s diary that happened before I was born. She gave it to me before she died in 2002.
‘She was going to write a book and there are pieces in the script critical to the early days from her notes. I suppose it’s difficult to imagine how poor they were – they just didn’t have any money sometimes.’
Howard adds: ‘I found out she had an illegal abortion in 1953, before I was born, because they could not afford to have a child. She talks about how devastated she was.
‘They were in a situation where they couldn’t afford to have children.
‘In the diary, she wrote that my father made her do it and she didn’t know if she would ever be able to forgive him.
‘She was devastated, which comes across in her diaries.’
When Raymond died aged 82 in 2008, there was speculation of a rift between him and his son, who now controls a large part of the estate. But Howard insists this is untrue.
‘I’ve never read so much rubbish in my life,’ he said.
Anna freil
Paul Raymond’s wife Jean
Portrayal: Actress Anna Friel, left, plays Paul Raymond’s wife Jean, right, in the film
Devoted: Paul Raymond pictured with his daughter Debbie in 1989
‘There’s this perception that he and I never spoke to each other, but that’s totally false. I saw him once a week, which is a lot more than many people see their parents.’
Equally false, he says, was speculation that his father had planned to turn the entire empire over to his sister Debbie, before she died of a drugs overdose in 1992.
‘Utter tosh!’ Howard exclaimed. ‘My father loved her very much, but he once told me, “She couldn’t run a chip shop.” So, he would never have left her in charge.’
Raymond did, however, leave the biggest slice of his wealth to Debbie’s daughters – India Rose, 22, and Fawn James, 27 – who were the other main beneficiaries in his will.
Howard, who runs Raymond Estates, the property company left by his father, says he is satisfied with his lot.
‘My job is to pass on the estate as intact as possible. He left me at least 20 per cent, at least that’s what I’d admit to. I don’t really think it’s anyone else’s business what the situation is.
‘My father’s legacy is Soho. Thirty years ago I never imagined anyone attaching themselves to the area but, thanks to him, people now want to be attached to Soho.’
High life: Paul Raymond pictured with four of the dancers from his club
High life: Paul Raymond pictured with four of the dancers from his club
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Don’t just be content with being in England. Try propagating English understanding of “negative freedoms” to the entirety of the Commonwealth after what Paul Raymond had done to complete the legacy of Human Rights and sex positvity in general. There are very narrow and insane sorts about here. Start with Malaysia. I’m sure the cancellation of degrees from England would be a very strong message to the ‘Islamust’ faction worldwide that Human Rights must be abided by and written into law. They do not get to tout those degrees without amending laws where necessary.
ARTICLE 10
What ‘decriminalise’ really means is: we’re giving junkies a drug den next door to you – by Peter Hitchens – PUBLISHED: 00:04 GMT, 21 April 2013 | UPDATED: 10:50 GMT, 21 April 2013
It will not be long before your home town has special places where drug abusers can poke or snort poison into their bodies. These will be legal and paid for by you and me.
It is a stupid idea, of course. People who take such drugs are selfish parasites in need of deterrence, not patients in need of treatment.
The nicer we are to them, the more of them there will be, as we have proved conclusively over the past four decades.
Brighton has unveiled plans to introduce ‘drug consumption’ rooms in the city
Brighton has unveiled plans to introduce ‘drug consumption’ rooms in the city
But it is getting harder every day to express this opinion, and soon it will be more or less impossible. The British liberal establishment have decided to surrender to the powerful and well-funded lobby that wants to ‘decriminalise’ drugs.
They use this clumsy word because international treaties prevent us from actually legalising them. Instead, we just reduce the penalties to nothing (or don’t enforce them) and make them legal in all but name.
Before they can get away with this loathsome scheme, they have to brainwash the public into accepting it.
That is why the unpopular newspapers and the BBC have been giving favourable coverage to a plan for ‘drug consumption rooms’ in Brighton. It is also why Portugal’s abandonment of serious drug laws is constantly presented in a kindly light by the establishment media.
Many of you will have been brainwashed yourselves. Do you know how many supposedly ‘conservative’ newspapers endorsed the decriminalisation of cannabis years ago?
It is amazing how many otherwise sensible people have already been fooled into accepting the dud arguments for relaxing the law against cannabis, one of the most dangerous drugs in existence.
Your children, too, will have been brainwashed at school – where they will have absorbed the moronic argument that because alcohol and tobacco are legal, it is wrong to have laws against dope.
Whenever I have the chance to debate this subject properly, I almost always defeat the drug liberalisers.
But that’s the problem. The debate has been shut down, because the liberals control it. Only one side is allowed to be heard. TV and radio won’t let me talk about this.
My recent book, showing that the supposed ‘war on drugs’ was abandoned 40 years ago, and that claims of stern ‘prohibition’ are propaganda drivel, was simply not reviewed by most national papers or on the broadcast programmes that discuss such things.
It is not yet too late to stop this process, but a great deal of vigilance will be needed to do so. Otherwise you may wake up one day soon and find a building near you is being openly used by junkies to inject themselves, with police approval.
This is all the warning you will get.
Will lovely Imogen’s name strike the wrong chord?
One of the many joys of the fine new film A Late Quartet (disgracefully hard to find in cinemas) is the lovely and talented actress Imogen Poots.
My only worry is this: will her career be held back by her charming but unusual surname?
Marilyn Monroe, for instance, started life as Norma Mortenson, Jean Harlow was Harlean Carpenter, and Greta Garbo was Greta Lovisa Gustafsson.
Imogen Poots in A Late Quartet
I got into North Korea by dancing (very badly) with the lovely female staff of the North Korean consulate in Shenyang, China.
This was the final stage of a hilarious obstacle course of cash payments and weird encounters. My mobile telephone, which I had to hand in before entering the Hermit Kingdom, has never recovered and is still haunted, doing things it ought not to.
I don’t claim, like the BBC’s John Sweeney, to have uncovered any great new truths while there.
My main discovery was that a lot of North Koreans (and is it any wonder?) are hopelessly drunk most of the time.
I think we should all take this sad country’s threats a lot less seriously.
The picture of female soldiers tripping along in high heels rather sums up the strange mixture of comedy and misery involved.
Some weeks ago, on the BBC Question Time programme, Lord Heseltine claimed before a large audience that I had called young soldiers ‘stupid’. I had not done so, as the record shows.
I protested at the time. He did not withdraw. I wrote to him explaining in detail why I would never have said such a thing. I asked him, twice, to set the record straight. He has twice declined.
Well, I would point out that his headed writing paper takes care to mention that he is the Right Honourable Lord Heseltine, and that he is a Companion of Honour, an order whose motto is ‘In action faithful and in honour clear’.
Well, is this behaviour faithful, honourable – or clear? Or are these chivalric titles just baubles of no account?
How sad, if so. I still hope he will do the decent thing. It seems to me to be a matter of honour.
How strange to see people applauding at Lady Thatcher’s funeral. What odd, un-British behaviour.
But how enjoyable to see the police compelled to wear proper tunics, and to see the Church of England forced to use the Prayer Book and the Authorised Version of the Bible, which it has spitefully stamped out in normal worship.
But these things were the last flickers of an older England, not a new beginning. Wait and see what happens next time.
A nasty outbreak of intolerance
The Left-wing media and their internet allies continue to make much of the outbreak of measles in Swansea.
This seems to be turning into an attack on free speech and on a free press.
Particular rage is being directed against conservative newspapers which gave prominence to claims – since discredited – that the MMR vaccination was linked to autism.
The claims were originally published in The Lancet, a highly respected and well-established medical journal. It was perfectly reasonable for newspapers to take them seriously.
The doubts were shared by Private Eye, a far-from-conservative satirical magazine with a reputation for tough, sceptical investigative reporting. Whistleblowers are sometimes wrong but often right.
Governments are often wrong, and secretive about their mistakes. Who can be sure who is correct on such matters, at the time? What if the warnings had turned out to be justified? Those who had sought to play them down would now look foolish.
Beware of this nasty mixture of intolerance mixed with hindsight.
And as for the measles outbreak, if the NHS had continued to offer the choice of single jabs to worried parents, rather than forcing them to choose between MMR or nothing, it is very likely that this would have been avoided.
CAN’T TV programme-makers try a bit harder to recreate the past? I lived in Oxford in the mid-Sixties, the period in which ITV’s new detective drama Endeavour is supposed to be set.
I understand that the shabby, tourist-free city of those days – with its steamy cattle-market, pungent brewery and busy factories, cannot be recreated.
But nobody wrote the figure seven in the continental style (with a horizontal line through the middle). Nobody took ‘medication’ (it was called ‘medicine’), or said ‘there you go’. Women didn’t wear pearls while pinning washing on the line. And the Vicar was the Rev John Blenkinsop, or Mr Blenkinsop. He was never, ever Reverend Blenkinsop, a stupid, ignorant Americanism nearly as bad as ‘bored of’, ‘can I get?’, and ‘train station’.
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Not really. Human Rights are right to access what is effectively a form of euthanasia. Drugs are just that, they are killing themselves albeit with alot of pleasure in the process. Who are we to stop them and being a civilised society, these controlled conditions will ensure they get to stay out of everyone’s way. What drug den? They will do their stuff in controlled conditions and won’t have a chance to wander around or enter people’s houses while stoned etc..
ARTICLE 11
World’s first GM babies born – by MICHAEL HANLON, Daily Mail
The world’s first geneticallymodified humans have been created, it was revealed last night.
The disclosure that 30 healthy babies were born after a series of experiments in the United States provoked another furious debate about ethics.
So far, two of the babies have been tested and have been found to contain genes from three ‘parents’.
Fifteen of the children were born in the past three years as a result of one experimental programme at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St Barnabas in New Jersey.
The babies were born to women who had problems conceiving. Extra genes from a female donor were inserted into their eggs before they were fertilised in an attempt to enable them to conceive.
Genetic fingerprint tests on two one-year- old children confirm that they have inherited DNA from three adults –two women and one man.
The fact that the children have inherited the extra genes and incorporated them into their ‘germline’ means that they will, in turn, be able to pass them on to their own offspring.
Altering the human germline – in effect tinkering with the very make-up of our species – is a technique shunned by the vast majority of the world’s scientists.
Geneticists fear that one day this method could be used to create new races of humans with extra, desired characteristics such as strength or high intelligence.
Writing in the journal Human Reproduction, the researchers, led by fertility pioneer Professor Jacques Cohen, say that this ‘is the first case of human germline genetic modification resulting in normal healthy children’.
Some experts severely criticised the experiments. Lord Winston, of the Hammersmith Hospital in West London, told the BBC yesterday: ‘Regarding the treat-ment of the infertile, there is no evidence that this technique is worth doing . . . I am very surprised that it was even carried out at this stage. It would certainly not be allowed in Britain.’
John Smeaton, national director of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, said: ‘One has tremendous sympathy for couples who suffer infertility problems. But this seems to be a further illustration of the fact that the whole process of in vitro fertilisation as a means of conceiving babies leads to babies being regarded as objects on a production line.
‘It is a further and very worrying step down the wrong road for humanity.’ Professor Cohen and his colleagues diagnosed that the women were infertile because they had defects in tiny structures in their egg cells, called mitochondria.
They took eggs from donors and, using a fine needle, sucked some of the internal material – containing ‘healthy’ mitochondria – and injected it into eggs from the women wanting to conceive.
Because mitochondria contain genes, the babies resulting from the treatment have inherited DNA from both women. These genes can now be passed down the germline along the maternal line.
A spokesman for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which regulates ‘assisted reproduction’ technology in Britain, said that it would not license the technique here because it involved altering the germline.
Jacques Cohen is regarded as a brilliant but controversial scientist who has pushed the boundaries of assisted reproduction technologies.
He developed a technique which allows infertile men to have their own children, by injecting sperm DNA straight into the egg in the lab.
Prior to this, only infertile women were able to conceive using IVF. Last year, Professor Cohen said that his expertise would allow him to clone children –a prospect treated with horror by the mainstream scientific community.
‘It would be an afternoon’s work for one of my students,’ he said, adding that he had been approached by ‘at least three’ individuals wishing to create a cloned child, but had turned down their requests.
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Name and identify so that a pure non-GMO line of humanity will be able to self identify and keep their lines ‘2 parent original’ from those with ‘3 parent modified’ lines. Discrimination is a right but as mentioned before, the politics must be neutral enough to accept any and everything.
ARTICLE 12
Marijuana Majority: Americans Now Back Legalization – by Jeff Nesbit | LiveScience.com – 20 Apr 2013
Jeff Nesbit was the director of public affairs for two prominent federal science agencies and is a regular contributor to U.S. News & World Report, where this article first ran before appearing in LiveScience’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
It’s 4/20 time again this week. For those who aren’t part of the Millennial generation, 4/20 is unofficial “Weed Day” in America —a counterculture phenomenon that has drawn up to 10,000 marijuana legalization activists at college campuses in the U.S. in some years.
In years past, Weed Day counterculture “holiday” celebrations have taken place on 4/20 at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, in several Canadian cities or at college campuses in Boulder, Colo., and elsewhere. Weed Day has also migrated to other parts of the world. [Cannabis: Facts About Marijuana & Effects of Marijuana]
Where did the concept of 4/20 as a way to celebrate marijuana smoking originate? That’s a bit more difficult to discern, though a reporter for The Huffington Post once tracked it down to a flyer at a Grateful Dead concert in 1990 that referred to “420ing” (smoking pot) on April 20 of that year that, in various stages, led to successive celebrations on April 20.
HuffPost also tracked it back even further, to San Rafael, Calif., high-school friends known as “the Waldos” who coined the term “4/20” in the 1970s as the designated time of the day to smoke pot after school. By fits and starts, 4/20 as either a time of day for pot smoking or a counterculture day of rebellion then traveled mostly by word of mouth.
This year, Weed Day enthusiasts hoping to see the tide turn (both politically and socially) on the legalization of marijuana front have more to celebrate than in years past.
A national survey by the Pew Research Center earlier this month found that, for the first time ever, a majority of Americans would now support regulating marijuana use the way that most states and federal authorities regulate alcohol use. [5 Wacky Things That Are Good for Your Health]
In fact, Pew found, the number of Baby Boomers who would support decriminalizing marijuana has gone up year after year during the 40 years it’s been asking about the question —and is now more than double what it was in the early 1990s.
Meanwhile, recent studies have confirmed what social scientists have been saying for years about the theory that marijuana is a “gateway drug” that leads to hard drug use —namely, that the “gateway drug theory” for marijuana simply doesn’t hold up scientifically.
If anything, these new studies found, other things like alcohol or cigarette use are better predictors than marijuana use of eventual prescription drug abuse or addiction to harder drugs like heroin and cocaine.
A Yale study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health late last year, for instance, found that alcohol or cigarette use was twice as likely to predict prescription opiate drug abuse as marijuana use. Prescription drug overdoses are far more prevalent now in America than either cocaine or heroin overdoses.
The Yale study pulled data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and found that, of the 12 percent who self-identified that they’d abused prescription drugs, 57 percent said that they’d previously used alcohol, 56 percent said they’d previously smoked cigarettes —and just 37 percent said they’d previously used marijuana.
A study published in The Journal of School Health focusing on the “gateway drug theory” for marijuana also found that alcohol, rather than marijuana, was the most commonly used substance for first-time drug users. Yet, alcohol has never been thought of as a gateway drug to cocaine, heroin or prescription opiate abuse.
In fact, social scientists and psychologists now argue rather conclusively that none of these are actually “gateway drugs” that lead someone down the path to addiction to harder or more addictive drugs.
Socio-economic considerations, environmental factors or genetics are much more likely to determine whether someone is more prone to abuse addictive substances, studies have shown repeatedly.
It’s been a long, slow decline for the “gateway drug theory” in the public’s mind, though. Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to look at the issues around medical marijuana use more than a decade ago. In a pivotal report in 1999, the NAS reported that “in fact, most drug users begin with alcohol and nicotine before marijuana —usually before they are of legal age.”
The NAS didn’t mince its words in that 1999 report to Congress. “In the sense that marijuana use typically precedes rather than follows initiation of other illicit drug use, it is indeed a ‘gateway’ drug,’” it said. “But because underage smoking and alcohol use typically precede marijuana use, marijuana is not the most common, and is rarely the first, ‘gateway’ to illicit drug use. There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs.”
None of these studies, however, slowed down the “gateway drug theory” in the public’s mind —until recently. Whether through a combination of “Weed Day” demonstrations on 4/20 or the success of medical marijuana initiatives in states around the U.S., most Americans are in a different place on marijuana now and would likely support it being regulated like alcohol consumption.
Yet, as longtime advocates of marijuana legalization know all too well, public and scientific support for their positions don’t necessarily translate into political action on such an issue. It may, in fact, be years before we finally see the official death of the gateway drug theory, and the rise of acceptable government action on the legalization of marijuana.
This article first appeared as Growing Numbers of Americans Support Legalizing Pot Use in the column At the Edge by Jeff Nesbit on U.S. News & World Report. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
This is not about majority but about principles. If a minority is right, the law should still support them (much like LGBT is a minority in society but has rights to associate protected from haters even as Jews can order kosher meals on some airlines despite being a minority). To mention majority as a raison d’etre for a law is always dangerous when democratic principles are concerned. If the majority support a law that is wrong, they still are wrong and that is where the learned state of judges come in – if not at least AFTER explaining why and how of minority-majority vs principles-correctness based around principles and logic or Voltarian freedoms (not just of speech but the life that free speech describes) than forcing through legislation in absentia of discussion with the public which sadly is often the case and even sadder is generally not paid attention to by the majority of the public!
Voltarian concepts of freedom doubtless preclude all fringe substances that can be grown and processed at home for legal use simply because no person is harmed. The only issue is not profiteering off others which can be done via price controls so that those growing and processing would get no more than a nursery or gardening service would – which is the scope and labour level of growing such organic psychedelics.
ARTICLE 13
Is the US ready for a third president called Bush? – by Rupert Cornwell – Sunday 28 April 2013
Out of America: ‘Dubya’ may have had his last spotlight moment. Now, it could be his younger brother’s turn
In the firmament of the Bushes, it was meant to be George W’s week, what with the dedication of his presidential library and an attendant spate of TV interviews, not to mention the rare gathering of all five living US presidents and ex-presidents to celebrate the occasion. In an odd way, though, last week belonged to Jeb.
The term “library” is a bit of a misnomer. These peculiarly American institutions, covering every presidency since Herbert Hoover’s, are indeed repositories of official papers, and managed by the federal government at taxpayers’ expense. But their construction is privately financed, and for the average visitor they are primarily museums, designed – not surprisingly – to present the men who raised the money for them in the best possible light.
If you doubt me, try Richard Nixon’s at his birthplace in Yorba Linda, California. True, the section dealing with a small matter called Watergate has been considerably beefed up, but overall the place retains an almost reverential air. And if the rehabilitation of the much-reviled “43” is to start anywhere, it will be at the George W Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
On Thursday, even Barack Obama got into the act, describing Bush as “a good man” and praising his “incredible strength and resolve” in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Not a word about Iraq, and not for an instant would you have imagined that he won an election six months ago by blaming everything wrong in the country on his predecessor.
But right now, even on Dubya’s big day in Dallas, the word association of “Bush” and “president” denotes not only him, or even his father, George H W Bush. Increasingly, the calculation involves Jeb, George’s youngest brother, the former two-term governor of Florida – and probably, at this absurdly early moment in the ante-post betting, the bookies’ favourite for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
America is supposed to be the land of opportunity for all. Increasingly, though, its politics can bring to mind Kirchners, Aliyevs and Assads. Once upon a time, US dynasties referred to financiers, industrialists and sports teams. Now, almost as much as in Argentina, Azerbaijan or Syria, they mean presidents. Between 1976 and 2012, not an election went by without featuring either a Bush or a Clinton in the primaries, and in 1992 the families squared off for the White House. What odds against a repeat?
A year ago, the prospect looked unlikely. Hillary Clinton was a visibly exhausted Secretary of State, telling one and all that she intended to retire after Obama’s first term and give herself over to writing and teaching. As for Jeb, “this was probably my time”, he mused wistfully in June 2012, soon after Mitt Romney, had clinched the nomination in one of the weakest Republican fields in memory.
But, of course, Jeb couldn’t have run then. The Bush brand was anathema; to have offered the country the chance of choosing another one so soon would have been, if not hubris, then a guarantee that a reporter’s first question would be, what was your brother’s biggest mistake?
Since then everything has changed. Romney was soundly beaten by Obama, and these days it’s not so much the Bush brand, but the entire Republican/Tea Party brand, well to the right of even George W, that’s in the doghouse. Jeb, a fiscal and social conservative but a keen proponent of immigration reform, with a Mexican wife and perfect Spanish, now looks the answer to his party’s problems with Hispanic voters, whose desertion to Obama sealed Romney’s defeat. As for Hillary, polls showing 70-plus per cent support are a wonderful antidote to weariness.
And there’s a further symmetry to a Bush/Clinton rematch. Even in her student days, her peers predicted that if America were ever to have a female president, it would be Hillary. As for Jeb, the smoothest, brainiest and most accomplished of George H W and Barbara Bush’s children, he was always seen by the father as bearer of the family’s political torch.
All that shifted, however, on 8 November 1994, when Jeb, the favourite, narrowly failed to be elected governor of Florida, while George Jnr, the ne’er-do-well, pulled off an upset victory over Texas’s popular incumbent, Ann Richards. Six years later, with Karl Rove still at his side, Jeb’s brother won the White House.
Now, maybe, Jeb’s time has truly come. But on one condition – that America, unlike four years ago, is ready once more for a Bush. The problem, of course, is in the name. As Haley Barbour, the ex-governor of Mississippi and wisest of old Republican birds, recently put it: “If Jeb’s last name was Brown instead of Bush, he’d probably be the front-runner for the Republican nomination. Then again, if it were Brown, we probably would have never heard of him.”
Jeb himself does nothing to discourage speculation. He gives weighty speeches about rebuilding America. He’s published a book on immigration reform, and is even allowing dirty linen (a former family maid who was deported for being an illegal immigrant) to be washed in public now, before opponents wash it in the heat of a campaign. A final decision, he says, will come after the 2014 mid-terms. As with Hillary, name recognition allows him to wait – and a Clinton run could silence complaints that Jeb is running on his name. Dynasties? Everyone does dynasties.
Except, perhaps, some complaints from within the family. Not from George W, who when asked last week for his advice to Jeb about 2016, replied, “Run”. But Barbara, at 88 more than ever the outspoken matriarch, feels differently. “It’s a great country,” she says, “it’s not just four families or whatever. We’ve had enough Bushes.” But, this time, the son may not listen to his mother. And if he runs and wins, a presidential library awaits.
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
The USA needs to set an example to the pond scum in the 3rd world about nepotism. The 3rd world, even USA’s’favourite’ Singapore, simply does not understand that family blocs or reserved seats, even a handful of reserved seats, causes conflict of interest and harms democracy. Listen to mom Jeb (see below link).
ARTICLE 13.5
Barbara Bush says Jeb Bush shouldn’t run for president – by Holly Bailey, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – Thu, Apr 25, 2013
Barbara Bush with former President George H.W. Bush and Jeb Bush in 2002. (Joe Burbank/Getty Images)DALLAS—Just hours before her son George W. Bush formally opens his presidential library here, former first lady Barbara Bush dismissed talk of a presidential run by another son, Jeb, in 2016.
In an interview with NBC’s ‘Today” show, Barbara Bush said she believed Jeb, a former Florida governor, was “the best qualified” to seek the Republican presidential nomination, but that he shouldn’t run.
“We’ve had enough Bushes,” Barbara Bush told NBC, adding there are other “people out there” who are qualified. “It’s a great country. There are a lot of great families and it’s not just four families or whatever.”
Her remarks come just a day after George W. Bush told ABC and CNN that he believes his brother should seek the presidency. Former first lady Laura Bush, who joined Barbara Bush in the “Today” show interview, said her brother-in-law would be a “terrific president,” but declined to say whether she thinks he’ll run.
“We don’t know, and we’re just letting him decide,” Laura Bush said.
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
For all the warmongering and petro-dollars in the Bush family, the Bushes do have a democratic bone in their makeip after all. Nepotism of the slightest in USA will embolden the nepotists in 3rd world countries all across the world. The USA should look at some of USA’s own laws against nepotism :
ARTICLE 14
Henrique Capriles ‘Has A Jail Cell Waiting For Him,’ Venezuelan Official Says (VIDEO) – by The Huffington Post | Posted: 04/24/2013 11:20 am EDT
Venezuela’s Penitentiary Minister Iris Varela said in a televised press conference Tuesday that she had a “jail cell waiting” for opposition leader Henrique Capriles, who she accused of being addicted to hallucinogens and being a fascist and a murderer, the local press reports.
It wasn’t clear from news reports whether the Venezuelan government had actually issued an arrest warrant for Capriles, but Varela’s comments highlighted the growing tensions over the contested presidential election and ensuing protests that left seven people dead.
“The only good news for you is that the prison that’s waiting for you, Capriles Radonski, won’t be like the ones we inherited,” Varela said, referring to the period before former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez first took office in 1999.
“You have an addiction and you know it,” Varela continued, saying that an unspecified drug habit led him to provoke violence by calling protests. “When someone is under the effect of hallucinogens, they’re capable of anything,”
Varela doesn’t cite evidence her long list of serious accusations against the politician, who has contested Venezuela’s close April 14 presidential election. Capriles has called on protesters to remain peaceful.
Venezuela held presidential elections April 14 to replace Hugo Chávez, who died in March. Though polls had placed Chávez’s successor Nicolás Maduro with a comfortable lead ahead of the vote, he won by thin margin of less than 2 percentage points.
Capriles contested the results, alleging that thousands of irregularities took place and demanding a manual recount. The National Electoral Council instead ordered an audit, which Capriles accepted, according to Reuters.
In Venezuela, each vote is tallied both electronically and on paper. An audit of the votes is a process that checks to make sure paper copy of the ballot matches the electronic record.
Protests followed the contested election, leading to seven deaths, which the Maduro government has blamed Capriles for personally. He routinely calls Capriles and his supporters “fascists.”
Spanish speakers can watch Varela making her accusations in the video above.
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
I strongly believe that Malaysia’s Pakatan Rakyat has also been using drugs to poison the local populace so that theya re more pliable and likely to vote them. the subliminal suggestions are amplified by Pakatan drug takers while suppressive drugs might be intyroduced in water via prvate water companies. In other words, a narco state based around poisoning of the local populace with drugs while taking drugs that stengthen themselves. this appears to have been going on since the early 2000s and ris Varela should make clear to all governments worldwide what Capriles is doing and what class of drugs to detect. I strongly believe that Malaysia’s Pakatan Rakyat is doing the same as Capriles.
GE13: PAS’ Hadi claims Marxist, drug dealer among PKR
http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?sec=nation&file=/2013/4/22/nation/20130422100121
malaysiandemocracy1 