Wednesday, December 18, 2013


Another one of Britain's multiculturalists at work



A husband [above] has been jailed for 17 years after he killed his wife by stabbing her at least 15 times then running her over with his car because he thought she was having an affair with a neighbour.

Minta Adiddo sent Akua Agyeman a Christmas card as she was being treated in hospital, blaming the attack on 'devils', the Old Bailey heard.

The 32-year-old mother of two died two months after the brutal stabbing, which was witnessed by her five-year-old daughter.

Adiddo, 38, was today given a life sentence after being convicted of murder, with a minimum term of 17 years.

The Sainsbury's worker from Enfield, North London, had pleaded guilty to manslaughter, although he denied murder.

The court heard he suspected his wife was having an affair with their neighbour Oledapo Etti-Williams in October 2012.  Mr Etti-Williams denied it, but said they exchanged three to four 'sometimes flirtatious' texts a day - and phone records showed they had sometimes sent as many as 80 messages in one day.

On November 5, Adiddo stabbed his wife with a large kitchen knife in their bedroom while their one-year-old daughter slept in a cot next to them.

Ms Agyeman managed to escape through the living room window, waking neighbours with her screams.

But her husband chased her down and stabbed her again in the street as she lay on the ground, leaving her with 15 separate stab wounds.

When he realised she still wasn't dead he got in his car and tried to run her over, almost ploughing into shocked witnesses who were tending to her.

Ms Agyeman's last words as she lay injured were to ask if her children were all right.

She fought for her life in hospital for nearly two months, but she was so badly injured that she would have been permanently paralysed if she had survived.

Adiddo fled the scene but was arrested after police spotted him driving his car shortly the next day still wearing his blood-stained shirt.

In victim impact statements read to the court, Ms Agyeman's family said the 'vibrant, sociable and intelligent' 32-year-old was 'irreplaceable.'  The judge heard her relatives in Ghana were now struggling financially without her support.

They said they had accepted Adiddo as a son and treated him with respect and dignity 'but all he has done is inflict pain and suffering on our family'.

SOURCE





So, crime DOES pay: Two men fight deportation to war-torn Congo. One is a thug who assaulted a policeman. The other's an innocent asylum seeker. Guess which of them gets to stay in the UK?

A violent foreign criminal has been allowed to remain in Britain – while a failed asylum seeker from the same country has been sent back home in an ‘utterly perverse’ human rights judgment that appears to show that crime does pay.

The Congolese thug has served time for robbery in the UK and once attacked a policeman, but has been spared deportation after a court ruled he would face being locked up if he returned to his native country.

A senior judge overturned the Home Office’s attempts to boot him out because of the risk that he would suffer torture or ill-treatment, contrary to human rights laws, in the ‘severe’ prisons of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The unnamed man, who is 26, may now even be granted asylum in the UK.

But a fellow countryman who was seeking refugee status in Britain, but had committed no crime, was told he could be safely deported because he did not have a criminal record, and so would not face detention from the authorities.

Last night it was feared the High Court ruling will lead to many more offenders born in the war-torn African state being allowed to remain in the UK after serving jail terms, despite Ministers’ repeated attempts to crack down on dubious human rights claims.

Dominic Raab, Conservative MP for Esher and Walton, who is a former Foreign Office lawyer, said: ‘This utterly perverse ruling allows yet another spurious human rights claim to scupper the deportation system.

'It will have a far-reaching impact for public protection and border control. We urgently need to change the law.’

Thousands of people from the DRC have come to Britain to escape the bloodiest conflict in modern African history, with an estimated five million deaths since 1998.

The UK authorities have tried to return those deemed not to have genuine asylum claims or who have committed crimes while in this country. There were 62 ‘enforced removals’ to DRC in 2010, 49 in 2011 and 32 last year.

Failed asylum seekers and convicted criminals have argued that they would face breaches of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights – which protects against torture or inhuman treatment – back in Africa.

But in a judgment published last week, a senior judge has ruled that failed asylum seekers can be safely sent back while the criminals cannot.

Mr Justice Phillips considered the case of a man known only as ‘P’ who arrived in Britain in 2001 from the DRC and was given indefinite leave to remain.

When still a teenager, he was convicted of ‘street robbery, affray and assault on a police officer’. He was sentenced to detention for public protection in 2006, with a minimum two years, for a serious robbery.

The judge also looked at the case of a 28-year-old, known as ‘R’, who came to Britain in 2010 and sought asylum on the grounds that he was a Tutsi who faced persecution in the DRC. But this claim was refused.

The pair were due to be sent home on the same flight in July 2012, until their lawyers were granted a last-ditch reprieve following comments made by a DRC ambassador to an English politician concerned about the plight of those returned to the country.

According to Mary Glindon, Labour MP for North Tyneside, the diplomat ‘typecast all of these  people, saying they have come to this country as members of the former oppressive regime in the DRC, are here because we have a good benefit system, and having committed terrible crimes in this country have to be punished when they return to the Congo’.

Challenged by the UK authorities, the ambassador insisted failed asylum seekers were ‘reunited with their families’. But he admitted: ‘People who are being deported for having committed crimes in the UK are held in custody to allow the Congolese justice system to clarify their situation.’

The judge considered reports by human rights groups and charities, concluding that only failed asylum seekers ‘perceived to be opponents of the DRC government’ would face ill-treatment.

By contrast, criminal returnees will be ‘detained for an indeterminate period’ in a prison or detention facility near the capital, Kinshasa, where they would face violence and rape.

He ruled ‘with considerable regret’ that the Congolese criminal must be allowed to stay in Britain as he would face human rights breaches at home.

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘We are considering the best legal approach to appeal this judgment.’

SOURCE





British Girl Guide group told to ditch God or be expelled: Troop faces removal from national body after leaders rejected new rules   

A girl guide group faces being thrown out of the national association after refusing to force members to drop God from the oath.

Troop leaders have rejected new rules saying that the inclusion of God should not be compulsory but a matter of personal choice.

But they have now been sent an ‘aggressive’ letter ordering them to back down or leave GirlGuiding UK at the end of the month. Critics branded the approach a ‘move for exclusion’.

The Guiding Promise was altered earlier this year so that members now swear ‘to be true to myself and develop my beliefs’ rather than the original ‘to love my God’.

But Glynis Mackie, 55, who has been leading the 37th Newcastle Guide Unit in Jesmond for more than 25 years, said the new pledge ‘sidelined’ Christianity.  Mrs Mackie, added: ‘This is an example of people not realising the importance of faith, of all faiths, in our community.  'I would go as far as saying that it is an example of faith being sidelined in society.’

‘I imagine changing the pledge was intended to include more people, but what it is actually doing is excluding those who have faith.

‘I understand why an atheist might not want to make a promise to God, and that is fine by me, but it has to be up to the individual.’

Mrs Mackie and the other leaders of the group slammed the new pledge as a ‘fridge magnet promise that doesn’t really mean anything’.

But Chief Guide Gill Slocombe insisted the move ‘opened our arms to welcome even more girls and adults, of all faiths –  and none’.

The words ‘to be true to myself and develop my beliefs’ have replaced ‘to love my God’, and the words ‘to serve the Queen and my community’ will replace ‘to serve the Queen and my country’.

Girl Guiding’s chief commissioner in the North East has told the group their membership of the organisation will be ended on December 31.

It means that the unit, which includes more than 100 girls in Rainbows, Brownies, Guides and Rangers from a variety of different faiths, will now have to meet as an independent group.

She added: ‘This letter, which is surprisingly aggressive, says that we "will not use" the new Promise and that simply isn’t true.

‘We would use this new form of words but we do want the children to have the choice to say the old Promise if they want to.’

Mrs Mackie wants Girl Guiding to take the same stance as the Scouts’ pledge, which says a member will ‘uphold our Scout values’ and can be taken by those who do not choose to vow to ‘do my duty to God’.

She added: ‘They are trying to force us out of Girl Guiding with no process and with only three weeks’ notice. The girls are really incredibly angry and they just want their voices to be heard.’

Chief Guide Gill Slocombe said: ‘Girl guiding is extremely sorry to hear of any Guide group leaving our organisation.

‘By changing the wording of our promise, after an extensive consultation with over 44,000 people, we have opened our arms to welcome even more girls and adults - of all faiths and none - who will benefit from all the fantastic things we do in girl guiding.

‘We hope the new wording will help us reach out to girls and women who might not have considered guiding before, so that even more girls can benefit from everything guiding can offer.’

David Holloway, the vicar of Jesmond Parish Church, wrote in the church’s monthly newsletter: ‘The hard reality is that this new promise is, whether intentionally or not, a move for exclusion.’

The changing of the Guide promise earlier this year sparked 839 official complaints from members amid fears of a split in the movement.

In August, one troop in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, vowed to resist the change but was forced to back down by national leaders.

SOURCE






Inequality and the Knock Out Game

The “knock out game,” where defenseless people are brutally and randomly attacked, is a shocker. It’s hard to imagine why teenagers, apparently bored out of their minds, would get a thrill out of beating up an old man or woman.

We are all outraged. But we are also divided on the causes. Some charge racism. Others cry a sick culture. Still others blame rising inequality in America.

Inequality was the subject of President Obama’s recent speech. He did not address the knockout game, but he clearly believes income inequality is the root cause of many of the social problems in America. It’s behind the rising mistrust in our society which he believes is damaging families and harming our “social cohesion.” I wouldn’t be surprised if the president thinks that his narrative of “mistrust” is at least partly to blame for the spread of the knockout game.

He is right about one thing--partly. There is an “income gap” in America, although as The Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler and Donald Schneider point out, the research shows little or no relationship between that gap and people’s ability to move up the ladder of opportunity. Yes, it is true that there is a problem with social mobility for those starting out near the bottom, even though the degree of the problem is often exaggerated.

But Obama is wrong about the cause. He thinks it is that the government has done too little to redistribute money and create new programs. The welfare state is still too small and entitlement spending too low, he says. Not enough is spent on unemployment insurance or federal education programs. If only the minimum wage was higher, or unions had stronger collective bargaining rights, presumably the “defining challenge of our time,” as he calls the issue of inequality, could be solved.

Put aside the grand canyon-sized gap between rhetoric and the reality; how raising the minimum wage a few dollars, or giving unionized government employees a raise, is supposed to even begin to solve the deep-seated social problems of America’s declining civil society is beyond me.

But the deeper problem is that President Obama has completely reversed cause and effect. America’s inner-city public schools are not a disaster because the minimum wage is too low. Rather they are a disaster because they don’t give young people the education and skills they need to command a sufficient wage in the market place. It is not insufficient government intervention which has caused inequality, but too much of the wrong kind of intervention.

As Butler, the American Enterprise Institute’s Charles Murray and Harvard’s Robert Putnam have shown, the causes of poverty and low income mobility are due much more to the decline of habits and attitudes that once fueled the upward rise of American households. The key building blocks of advancement, such as industriousness, the habit of savings, marriage and civic associations, are crumbling and in some cases even non-existent. The cause is not insufficient redistribution of income by government, but the destruction of the social and personal capital of people by that distribution system—namely, the welfare state.

The dependency and life style created by it is not some temporary thing, as the president pretended it was in his speech. Rather it has become the culture of a government-sponsored underclass. The dependency not only deprives lower-income people of a future, it destroys the habits, attitudes and positive outlooks needed to get ahead in life. It takes what may have been a “run of bad luck,” as the president put it, and institutionalizes it into a debilitating way of life.

There are indeed income and social divisions in American society today, but they are driven not by a run-amok free-market economy. America’s falling score on The Heritage Foundation’s and The Wall Street Journal’s Index of Economic Freedom shows that the U.S. has steadily been moving away from free markets. In other words, there’s been more government intervention in recent years, not less. And yet the economy continues to flounder, and President Obama still insists we need more government to solve problems which government itself created.

We have economic problems to be sure, but when it comes to inequality, it’s not the free market, but the “culture, stupid.” It’s a yawning gap in habits, education and attitudes that underlay the divisions of rich and poor.

On the one side are wealthy Americans with Harvard MBAs and strenuously honed work ethics, many of them socially liberal and increasingly dependent in their businesses on government support. On the other side are low-income people who, regardless of race, find themselves without the skills, habits and education to get ahead. Some are stuck because they are too dependent on government benefits. But most are trapped by a culture that ignores the value of marriage and fails to teach the hard virtues of industriousness, discipline and personal responsibility.

The sad truth is this: If there are “two Americas,” it is a divide in economic opportunity caused largely by different cultures. Economic inequality is mainly the result of the “stickiness” (as Butler calls it) of cultural values determining the outcomes of economic behavior in America.

So to put the knockout game in perspective, it may or may not be true that the criminal perpetrators were denied economic opportunities. It’s no excuse even if they were. But if so, it is more likely the result of a dysfunction in values than anything else—the very anti-social attitudes which caused them to attack innocent people to begin with.

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 POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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