Sunday, December 09, 2012



Unbelievable:  British Car thief is handed £2,000 in compensation after being bitten by police dog while he was being arrested

A police force had to pay £2,000 in compensation to a car thief after he was bitten by a police dog while in the middle of a break-in.

The unnamed man was injured when he tried to flee after being confronted by a dog handler while breaking into a vehicle in the Meadows area of Nottingham.  It is believed he spent several days in hospital.

The payout came to light following a Freedom of Information request regarding people who had sued Nottinghamshire Police over dog bites in the past three years.  In total, over £19,000 has been paid to six claimants.

A spokesman for the force said he was unable to discuss individual cases, or comment on when the incident took place.

But he said: 'When a person or suspect is bitten by a police dog, there are robust procedures in place to ensure that it is recorded, reviewed and assessed whether any further action is necessary, including a referral to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

'Any claim for compensation is investigated thoroughly to establish the circumstances surrounding the incident. The result of the investigation will determine whether the applicant is successful or if their claim is rejected.

'The training, deployment and management of police dogs within Nottinghamshire Police is constantly reviewed and developed in order to maintain the highest possible standards of professionalism and welfare.

'A dog handler will always instruct a suspect to stand still and not run away. In some cases this instruction is ignored, and as the dogs are trained to pursue and restrain individuals, they will be detained by the dog, and this may result in a dog bite.'

'Every dog utilised by the Force undergoes additional training throughout the year, specifically around bite control, which is in line with national requirements and must be completed in order for any police dog to maintain its national licence'.

All 16 general purpose police dogs within Nottinghamshire Police are used to assist with general patrols and are deployed to all types of incidents.  All of the dogs are trained in detaining suspects and or anyone who poses a threat to the public.

SOURCE







British PM  warned that the House of Lords will 'massacre' gay marriage laws

David Cameron has been warned that plans to let same-sex couples marry in churches will be "massacred" in the House of Lords and alienate grassroots Conservatives

Tory MPs and Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, have reacted with dismay after the Prime Minister said places of worship will be allowed to conduct same-sex weddings.   The decision represents a major u-turn on the position set out in a formal Government consultation earlier this year which proposed a blanket ban.

Mr Cameron was today branded "arrogant" by Stewart Jackson, MP for Peterborough, who is one of more than 100 Conservatives preparing to fight the new laws.

The Prime Minister has stressed that no religious group will be forced to marry gay people but opponents of the laws fear that churches could face challenges under equality laws.   He will allow Conservative MPs a free vote to follow their conscience on the issue, but Labour and the Liberal Democrats are likely to team up with the Government in favour.

Lord Carey, the former Archbishop, said here was a real possibility that the bill could be defeated in the Lords.  “I think it makes a mockery of the Government’s attempt to consult and then review in the light of that consultation," he said.  

“Bearing in mind that so many Conservative MPs are unhappy about this, it seems to be madness on the part of the Government to rush through in this kind of way – this is not wisdom.

“I think it is very hard to gauge how the House of Lords will vote on this. Many will go with the Government on the equality aspect but my guess is that there will be a fair number of Conservatives and a fair number of cross-benchers with a few Labour to make it a very interesting debate.

“And I hope that the House of Lords, which is known to question Commons procedure, may take a different view, I think it could be defeated.”

Mark Pritchard, a Conservative MP for The Wrekin, urged to Mr Cameron to hear the "alarm bells" of discontent from the Tory grassroots, comparing it to discontent about his failure to call an EU referendum.   "Same-sex marriage Bill will undo much of the good outreach work the Party has done with Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu communities," he added.

His colleague, Mr Jackson, predicted the new laws will be defeated in the House of Lords as the Prime Minister will not be able to force through legislation.

By convention, governments can only use the Parliament Act to overrule peers if the new law relates to a policy that was included in their election pledges. The Conservatives only pledged to "consider" it in their equality manifesto.

To add to the fury of many Tory MPs, Mr Cameron has stalled over tax breaks for married couples, which was in the Conservative manifesto.

Mr Jackson wrote on Twitter: "Gay marriage bill will be massacred in the Lords and [the Government] can't use Parliament Act as it wasn't in manifesto. Arrogant Cameron knows best."

Bob Blackman, MP for Harrow East, predicted "outrage throughout the country" about the new developments.   He told BBC News: "For the majority of our supporters out in the country, marriage is between one man and one woman. And so changes to the definition of marriage are not appreciated and I think are not strongly supported."

SOURCE








It's the social workers who are racist, say Slovak parents in UKIP fostering scandal

Thought Police furore is  more shocking than it seemed

The birth parents of the children at the centre of the UKIP fostering row can today be revealed as a Slovakian couple who have had six of their offspring taken away by social workers.

Last night the father accused council staff of ‘racism’ and of destroying his family as he told how  20 police officers ‘raided’ their home to remove their last four children.

The authorities have also taken the couple’s grandchild (the baby son of their 17-year-old married daughter), bringing the total number now being looked after by the state from this one family to seven. Their ages range from five months to 11 years.

The parents, who are happily  married and came to Britain five years ago, found themselves at the centre of national controversy after the staunchly Labour council in Rotherham, Yorkshire, discovered that it had sent three of their removed children to live with a foster couple who are UKIP members.

The furore blew up when social workers abruptly moved the children from the foster couple because they considered that their support of the anti-EU party, which attracted nearly one million votes at the last election, made them incapable of fulfilling the East European youngsters’ ‘cultural and ethnic needs’.

The astonishing decision was attacked by MPs from all political parties, and Rotherham social services were accused of acting like ‘Thought Police’.

Ironically, the council has also been criticised for failing to protect scores of young girls, some in care, who have been sexually abused by street grooming gangs, mainly of Pakistani heritage.

UKIP claimed the Slovak children’s removal from loving foster parents — who said they grew fond of the three and had bought them Christmas presents — was for blatant political reasons.

Now, the Mail can tell the story of the children’s birth parents — and reveal growing concerns at the number of children being taken away from Eastern European migrant families for adoption or fostering, at increasing expense to the state. The issue is causing rising tension between the British and Slovak governments.

Through friends, the parents of the Rotherham children say the irony is that despite the council’s fears of the UKIP foster couple being racist, it is the council which has picked on them because they are Roma, and social workers disapprove of their non-British ‘lifestyle’.

The Slovak father told friends: ‘It is the social services who have been racist against my family.’

However, social services are standing by their original decision to remove the Slovak couple’s first  two children, made after one of their sons was found wandering the streets of Rotherham at two in the morning shortly after they came to Britain. The council then took their newly born grandchild into care this summer.

The remaining four children were seized in September when social workers deemed the family’s small terrace house was ‘overcrowded’ and infested with mice, said the father.

Social workers claim there are other concerns about the family, including suspicions that the father had physically abused some of the children. He, and their mother, have denied this.

Over the past five years since the EU’s borders were opened, more than 3,500 Eastern Europeans (including many Slovak and Czech Roma) have settled in Rotherham.

Astonishingly, the family had six children taken into care

The council has encouraged them to adopt British ways by sending their children to school, putting them to bed on time rather than letting them play out on the streets and not smacking or hitting them as a punishment.

But, according to neighbours, the Slovak family’s children were happy and there were photos lovingly displayed around the house of them smiling and laughing.

Whatever the merits of the social services’ actions, the 46-year-old father is angry at the way his children have been separated from each other by the authorities and the brutal manner in which they were removed. The last ‘raid’ on their home saw council staff and police hustle the children into cars as they screamed for their 34-year-old mother, who was left crying in the street. Neighbours who comforted her said the scene they witnessed was ‘appalling cruelty to an ordinary family’.

The father says: ‘What has happened has broken my wife’s heart. She has talked of killing herself since her children were  taken away. I would like to leave Britain, but I cannot desert my six children who are living in different groups with strangers.’

His married daughter, who has her own home in Yorkshire, said: ‘I have not seen my own baby boy since he was taken from me at a month old this summer.’

She insists her child was removed because she is Slovakian and the council disapproved of her lifestyle. ‘This was my first child and I looked after him well. The council said they wanted to assess how I cared for him when he was born because I am a teenage mother. They did so for a month, and then took him away against my will,’ the mother told a Slovakian TV reporter.

Neither she nor her parents can be named in order to protect the identity of their children.

The father of the six children has told friends: ‘I love all my children and would never hurt them. I came to Britain to work and make a better life for my sons and daughters. I never believed this could have happened to us.’

He has complained that he and his wife are allowed to visit their children only at a contact centre under supervision of social workers. It is believed they saw some of the children taken in September for the first time last week.

It's caused street protests in the Slovak capital, Bratislava

The couple first realised their own three children were at the centre of the ‘UKIP row’ when told by their lawyer a few days ago. 

The fostering row and subsequent public outrage helped UKIP score its best-ever by-election result — coming second in last week’s poll in the staunchly socialist seat of Rotherham.

It’s clear that many of the local community are aware of the family involved. ‘We are scared that our own children will be the next ones taken by the social services,’ said one woman with a baby as she joined a group of other Slovaks at a social centre. The Eastern European community in Rotherham has held emotional meetings about the social services’ actions. Some Slovaks and Czechs claim that children are being removed on ‘any excuse’ to give to English parents for adoption.

The Slovak father, a handsome and articulate man, was contacted for comment by a Slovakian television station after his first two children were taken.

The TV station asked him to take part in a talk show highlighting how more than 120 children from 40 Slovakian families have been put into care by social workers in England. Some have been adopted and will never see their parents again.

However, the father refused to do so, hoping that he would get his children back. Indeed, he says he has been told he faces jail if he talks to the Press.

Meanwhile, the Slovakian Government has protested to the British authorities about the huge numbers of Slovak children being put into care by social workers, and last Friday a debate at the Council of Europe, which promotes human rights in all European countries, centred on the scandal.

A resolution was passed that said children are being removed by UK social services and family courts ‘against the will’ of their natural  parents and in violation of the ‘right to respect of family life’ and the ‘principle of fair trial’.

It insisted that social workers should give ‘practical assistance’ to families in difficulties instead of their children being put into care which caused ‘irreversible damage’ to the entire family.

A sign of the diplomatic tensions between Slovakia and Britain came in September, when protesters filled the street outside the British embassy in the Slovak capital of Bratislava, waving placards saying ‘Stop legal kidnapping’ and ‘Britain thief of children’.

The demonstration coincided with a hearing at London’s Court of Appeal in which a Slovak grandmother — supported by the country’s authorities — pleaded for the return of her two young grandsons, who were seized from their parents in Britain two years ago after one of the boys was found to have a rash on his genitals.

Suspicions that he had been abused were later ruled out, but the boys have still not been returned to the family by Surrey Council social workers.

In another case this autumn, Slovak officials attended a court hearing in Kent that ended with five children being sent back to their extended family in Slovakia after being taken by social workers because their parents left them unsupervised while working night shifts.

The family courts operate in strict secrecy to protect the identities of the children involved. It means that evidence given by social workers and their hired medical experts cannot be publicly challenged.

Parents who talk publicly about what happens there — even to their MPs — have been sent to prison.

Last night John Hemming, the Liberal Democrat MP who has questioned the courts’ secrecy and why 500 English children of all backgrounds are taken into care every week, said: ‘Few realise how many Eastern European children are being taken away by social services.

‘Of course, this has long been happening to English families. But many parents are innocent and do not deserve to lose their children.

‘It will be costing Rotherham Council £40,000 a year for each of the seven children they have taken in this case — a total of nearly £300,000 a year. The council has complained it is short of money.

‘If it feels there is something wrong with these Slovakian parents, why don’t they send the family back to Slovakia where the authorities there can judge for themselves? They will understand their culture and lifestyle.’

The UKIP-supporting foster couple refused to comment when the Mail told them that six children, plus a grandchild, had been taken from the Slovak parents. 

Rotherham Council has said it will not comment on any individual cases of children it removes from families into care.

SOURCE







A Queer Need for Rejection

Mike Adams

Whenever I write about the issue of First Amendment Freedom of Association, I defend the right of campus groups, not government administrators, to control their own belief structure and membership requirements. This often involves discussing real life cases with real life tension between religious groups and homosexual activists. This results in a slew of emails asking why a homosexual student would ever want to join a fundamentalist religious group. The short answer to the question is that homosexual activists don't really want to join these organizations. Some want to use them for political gain before shutting them down altogether.

The homosexual rights movement is not a political movement seeking equality. It is a religious movement seeking affirmation. Conservative Christian organizations refuse to offer affirmation of the homosexual lifestyle. In fact, they actually condemn it. So they become targets of homosexual activism.

Paradoxically, homosexual activists also target conservative Christians because being rejected by them is an important part of the process of attaining affirmation from the general public. When a homosexual activist tries to "join" such a group, it is often done with the following goals in mind:

1. Using discrimination claims to strengthen the genetic argument (and using the genetic argument to strengthen discrimination claims). It is fairly obvious why homosexuals want to assert that homosexuality is genetic. If they are programmed to behave in a certain way then homosexuality becomes less of a behavior and more of a status. This helps advance efforts to include sexual orientation in anti-discrimination laws, which are meant to give homosexuals equal power in relation to legitimate civil rights causes based upon immutable physical characteristics.

The only problem with the genetic argument is that it lacks supporting evidence. There is no more evidence for a gay gene than there is for Santa Claus or for legitimate feminist scholarship. The best the activist can do is to argue circumstantially that no one would choose a lifestyle that guarantees being subjected to discrimination. The argument is as silly as saying there must be an interracial dating gene because no one would choose to be subjected to discrimination for dating someone of another race.

But homosexual politics is not about logic. It is about end results. Activists need to be subjected to "discrimination" in order to advance their cause. So they join conservative Christian groups they do not like, engage in advocacy they know offends and disrupts the group, get kicked out of the group, and then claim to have been discriminated against. Finally, they lobby for stronger anti-discrimination rules that put them on a par with blacks and women.

2. Defaming the opposition. Homosexuals have a lot of options on campus. They can join a Unitarian Universalist group, they can join a United Methodist group, or they can start their own religious group that affirms homosexual conduct. But the very thought that someone on their campus disagrees with their lifestyle makes them angry. They simply cannot "coexist" (no matter what their bumper stickers say). This anger is probably due to awareness that they are engaging in a lifestyle that is both unnatural and immoral. So, if you can't beat the Christians, just join them (and eventually destroy them). It’s always destroying, not joining, that motivates them.

After they join the group they don't want to be in - and deny the stated principles of the group they never agreed with - the unable-to-coexist homosexual activist goes to the administration with a complaint. When the Christian group is expelled from campus under the anti-discrimination clause people ask "Why did the Christian group have to expel the homosexual?" Stated another way, the question becomes "Why can't Christians coexist with homosexuals?"

In the end, the homosexual activist has made the group whose very existence he refuses to tolerate look intolerant. Another public relations victory!

3. Containing moral criticism. Of course, once the conservative Christian group is gone a clear message is sent to those who would dare to criticize the homosexual lifestyle. This exerts a powerful chilling effect on constitutionally protected religious expression.

But that isn't the end of things. The homosexual rights movement continues to redefine homophobia in order to reduce any semblance of criticism directed toward the homosexual agenda. Isn't this similar to what we have seen in the struggle for racial equality in America?

At first, the civil rights movement was about stopping lynching and racial segregation. After redefining racism (to include any disagreement with black leaders whatsoever) the movement has become little more than a mechanism used to suppress political speech. Racism went from being a social problem to being a political weapon. Redefining homophobia now serves the same function for the homosexual activist that redefining racism served for the civil rights activist.

But there is one crucial difference between the black civil rights movement and the homosexual rights movement. The former began by addressing real oppression before eventually (and incessantly) crying “wolf” as a means of punishing political speech. The latter began as an attack on free speech that becomes more pronounced with each and every concession.

The supreme irony of all this is that the NAACP is the organization that first won legal recognition of the right to freedom of association in 1958. They prevailed in a successful effort to keep the KKK from joining and destroying their organization. The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the NAACP saying they could keep their membership lists secret and even keep out those who disagree with their beliefs.

Today, in an effort to attain moral equivalency with the NAACP, the homosexual rights movement is adopting one of the old tactics of the KKK. Politics makes strange bedfellows – particularly when it demands affirmation of what goes on in the bedroom.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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