Telegraph – India took a big step on Tuesday towards approving legislation that would reserve one-third of seats in the country’s parliament for women. Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, described the 186-1 vote in the upper house of parliament as a “historic step forward toward emancipation of Indian womanhood”. The bill now goes to the lower house, where it is likely to pass. The vote came after socialist lawmakers blocked the parliamentary debate on Monday and forced the upper house to adjourn twice on Tuesday. The protesters later boycotted the voting. Read article
Columbus Dispatch – The few hundred residents who live in a bucolic corner of Maryland’s Eastern Shore don’t object to the 400 jobs that might come from a new State Department facility funded with stimulus money. But they’re not really into the noise and commotion that would come from the high-speed chases, machine-gun fire and bomb blasts. Read article
Wired – The U.S. intelligence community wants to master the art of BS-detection. But instead of improving on pre-existing methods, like polygraph tests or voice-stress analysis, they want to amplify our own, intuitive, “pre-conscious human assessment of trustworthiness.” Read article
Associated Press – The fallout of war has a price in southern Afghanistan. U.S. Army units fighting the Taliban in Helmand province have a compensation system for any death, injury or damage to crops and buildings caused by American forces to Afghan civilians and their property. The suffering of a population caught between combatants during the Afghan war is a politically sensitive issue, and NATO troops have sought to make amends for deadly airstrikes and other instances in which civilians were killed. Read article
Telegraph – The Government has been accused of pursuing a secret policy of encouraging mass immigration for its own political ends. The release of a previously unseen document suggested that Labour’s migration policy over the past decade had been aimed not just at meeting the country’s economic needs, but also the Government’s “social objectives”. Read article
Telegraph – Saudi Arabia says it will not give up a controversial rehabilitation programme for Islamist radicals heavily criticised in the US after former inmates set up an al-Qaeda cell in neighbouring Yemen. Read article
Spiegel – While the inflow of aid into Haiti is getting more organized, thousands are trying to flee the country. They include tourists, diplomats and reporters. And, increasingly, aid workers who are worn out by what they have experienced. Christen Parker clutches a small, tattered notebook. “These are my stories,” she says and shows pages and pages filled with cramped, scribbled writing, a gushing of words. Some are blurred, as if they have become wet. Others just break off mid sentence. Read Article
BBC – More victims of deadly religious clashes in central Nigeria have been found, with scores of bodies stuffed in wells and sewage pits. Up to 150 bodies have been found in Kuru Karama village, 30km (18 miles) from the city of Jos, where the violence erupted last Sunday. Correspondents say elders hid in holes for seven hours to escape the violence. An exact death toll is not known but overall 300 or more are thought to have died in the Muslim-Christian clashes. Read article
ABC – New anti-association laws proposed by the State Government have been described as draconian and a direct threat to civil liberties. They are being picked apart by unions, criminologists and the legal fraternity with members of the state’s most notorious bikie clubs also rallying against the changes. If approved, the tough new laws would give police the power to ban people from associating with certain groups, as part of a State Government push to target organised crime. Read article
BBC – The US says it will temporarily allow orphaned Haitian children into the US, following last week’s earthquake. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the move would allow children eligible for adoption in the US “to receive the care they need”. Other nations said they were speeding up the process to allow Haitian children to join adoptive families. Read Article
BBC – Chile’s president has apologised to the descendants of a group of indigenous people who were shipped to Europe in the late 19th Century and exhibited. The remains of five Kawesqar Indians, from the country’s southernmost region, were honoured in a ceremony after being flown back to the country. Taken in 1881, they were displayed as curiosities in European cities. President Michelle Bachelet said the government had been guilty of “neglect in the face of such abuses”. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Clashes in the Calabrian town of Rosarno, which erupted on Thursday during a protest by mainly African farm labourers, had injured 18 policemen and 19 foreigners in two days, authorities in Reggio Calabria province said. Around 100 locals armed with batons and metal bars, and some carrying clubs and cans of petrol, had meanwhile set up a barricade late Friday near a place where many immigrants meet, the Italian news agency ANSA reported. Others had earlier occupied the town hall to demand immigrants be removed, Italian media reported. Read article
Guardian – Up to 20 million Bangladeshis may be forced to leave the country in the next 40 years because of climate change, one of the country’s most senior politicians has said. Abul Maal Abdul Muhith, Bangladesh’s finance minister, called on Britain and other wealthy countries to accept millions of displaced people. In a clear signal to the US and Europe that developing countries are not prepared to accept a weak deal at next week’s Copenhagen climate summit, Abdul Muhith said Bangladesh wanted hosts for managed migration as people began to abandon flooded and storm-damaged coastal areas. “Twenty million people could be displaced [in Bangladesh] by the middle of the century,” Abdul Muhith told the Guardian. Read Article
Ed – In politics there is a practice known as “dog whistle” policies. They wash over those already “on message”, and likewise those who are “off message”, but are heard loud and clear by those who are undecided – in this case play to middle-England’s greatest fears – immigration – so to scare them towards your path
SPIEGEL- Germany’s highest court has ruled that Sunday should be kept as a day of rest and has overturned a Berlin law easing restrictions on Sunday shopping. Most German newspapers on Wednesday greet the ruling, some for reasons of religion and tradition, others out of a concern for workers’ rights. Read Article
ABC - US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has taken a new and surprising tack by abandoning America’s demands for Israel to freeze construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Palestinian leaders have repeatedly said the peace process cannot resume until all construction stops – even the natural expansion of existing settlements. But during a visit to the region Ms Clinton has sided with Israel and is pressuring the Palestinians to make concessions. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Bosnia is heading for a new civil war as a constitutional crisis threatens to cause the collapse of the political system, the country’s leaders have warned. Read Article
The Guardian – Nick Griffin, the British National party leader, thwarted attempts by up to 1,000 anti-fascist protesters to stop him entering the BBC’s Television Centre in west London this evening ahead of his appearance on Question Time. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – Consultancy Oxford Economics pointed to surveys that indicated there were now around 6.6 million UK residents who had been born abroad, compared with 4.3 million in 2001. The figures emerged in a study carried out for the Department for Communities and Local Government, published on its website last month. Read article
The Historian – Human beings are unfortunately very predictable, especially during an economic downturn. The political class of the UK (but in every other country too) has always known what the upshot of uncontrolled immigration policies would be – racial conflict. Thus enabling them to impose ever more stringent laws to “protect” and thus reduce civil liberties. Classic divide and conquer strategy, and as usual using humanity’s worst traits against us.
BBC – Rival ethnic groups in Kenya who fought after the 2007 election are rearming in readiness for violence at the 2012 poll, a BBC investigation has found. It is feared villagers in Rift Valley province are moving from traditional weapons such as spears to machine guns. Read Article
Telegraph.co.uk – Atheists have more success at online dating, according to a light-hearted statistical study of opening messages. Self-effacing men are also more likely to get a reply to their approaches, while nothing puts potential dates off more than textspeak like “ur” and “luv”. The advice is based on analysis of more than 500,000 “first contacts” sent by users of OkCupid, the leading US dating website. Read article
The Times – Adulterers will be stoned to death under draconian new laws passed in the Indonesian province of Aceh yesterday. Hardline Muslim politicians in the semi-autonomous region unanimously passed the Sharia edict, under which single people will also be given 100 lashes for pre-marital sex, just weeks before a new, more moderate government dominated by the Aceh Party is due to take power. Read Article
ABC News – Eight people have been arrested after riot police intervened to stop clashes between Muslims and anti-Islamic protesters outside a London mosque on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks. About 1,000 mostly Muslim protesters, many wearing masks, were involved in running scuffles around the newly-built Harrow Central Mosque, in north-west London, following a demonstration by a fringe anti-Islamic group. Read Article
The Guardian – Many more children need to be taken into care at birth to stop them being damaged beyond repair by inadequate parents, the chief executive of the children’s charity Barnardo’s has told the Observer. Martin Narey called for less effort to be directed at “fixing families that can’t be fixed” and for social workers to be braver about removing children at risk. Read Article
The Biochemist – A bad parent? How to judge? Since reading some autobiographies about abuse, I know it is seldom simple. The system or an individual within it can let the child(ren) down, when case workers have urged removal. Fostering the under-ones – you gonna? – know anyone who would? More foster-carers are urgently needed.
ABC (Aust.) News – A few weeks ago the ABC’s Middle East correspondent Anne Barker was caught up in a violent protest involving ultra-Orthodox Jewish men in Jerusalem. As Anne tried to record the protest, against the opening of a municipal carpark on the Jewish Sabbath, the mob spat on her repeatedly. Read Article
The Biochemist – This article is a great opportunity to appreciate the quite different factors that contributed to this situation; awareness of religious traditions and feelings; mob mentality; and the complex interaction between the two.
BBC – A new study suggests that people from different cultures read facial expressions differently. East Asian participants in the study focused mostly on the eyes, but those from the West scanned the whole face. [Read Article]
