Daily Mail | Dec 3, 2009

By Chris Brooke

Heartbroken: Lisa Hessey was told she would have her parental rights taken away in court if she opposed a decision to place Zak in care

Like many toddlers, Zak Hessey was a fussy eater who refused his mother’s healthy home cooking.

Concerned about his falling weight, his parents sought the advice of doctors. That simple act triggered a shocking chain of events that led to the youngster being put into foster care for four months.

Paul and Lisa Hessey believe in the long-term benefits of healthy eating and rejected advice to feed their two-year-old son high-calorie snack food such as chocolate, crisps and cakes.

To their horror, social workers put Zak into foster care ‘to assess his needs’ and allegedly threatened the couple with the loss of their parental rights if they fought the decision in court.

‘I was absolutely devastated, I broke down in tears,’ recalled Mrs Hessey, 48. ‘I was scared out of my wits. I phoned Paul to tell him and he just broke down on the phone.’

But they went to court and, after four months, Zak returned home with the blessing of social services, who accepted he had good and caring parents.

Zak is now putting on some weight, but his eating problems were not cured by his time in the care of ‘experts’ and, much to the annoyance of his parents, he has acquired a taste for junk food.

Mrs Hessey, of Bolsover, near Chesterfield, said: ‘I thought I was doing the right thing going to the best people for advice when Zak began to lose weight.

‘Instead they basically accused me of neglecting him and implied it was all my fault. I have four other children and they are perfectly healthy, it was just that Zak was refusing food for some reason. They said I should just feed Zak chocolate, cakes and junk food just to get calories into him. But I objected, saying that was only a short-term answer and not a proper solution.

‘The Government and doctors are always drumming into parents the importance of healthy eating – yet they were telling us to feed Zak all the wrong things.

‘That is obviously what they were doing when he was in foster care so now it is hard to get him to eat anything else.’

Mrs Hessey and her 48-year-old husband, a lorry driver, took Zak to see a paediatrician at Chesterfield Royal Hospital in July. He was 20 months old and weighed 1st 3lb.

Mrs Hessey, whose four other children are under ten, said she was happy for Zak to be admitted for a two-week hospital assessment and was hit by a thunderbolt when she went to collect him on July 24.

She was taken into a room with a nurse and social worker who apparently told her: ‘We would like Zak to go into foster care to assess how he feeds. You have legal rights but be warned if you oppose this we will go straight to court and have all your parental rights taken away.’

Mrs Hessey said: ‘They kept saying, “If you love Zak and you want the best for him then you’ll agree to this”. They said we had been negative about eating. That was because they had been telling us we should feed Zak crisps, chocolate and cakes to get calories into him.

‘I was questioning that approach. We eat proper home-made food at our house and just have chocolate and cakes as a treat.’

She agreed to Zak going into care after hearing to the possible repercussions if she objected. Initially she and her husband couldn’t see Zak for six days.

After hiring a solicitor, they were allowed three hours a day with him during the week in the company of a social worker.

The first hearing before the family court in Derby was on September 2 and the case was adjourned for two weeks. Interim care orders were imposed and Zak returned home following a third court hearing on November 18. By this stage social workers had lifted their objections – and he had put on only 1lb.

Mrs Hessey said: ‘Social services did a complete about turn. They admitted that in foster care Zak was exactly the same with his food as he was at home.

‘They said we were very good parents. I still find it hard to come to terms with how we have been treated.’ Derbyshire County Council said: ‘We only take a child into our care either with the consent of the parents or following very careful consideration by a court.’

A spokesman for Chesterfield Royal Hospital said: ‘While we understand Mr and Mrs Hessey’s distress, Zak’s welfare was paramount and we believe we acted in his best interest.’

1950 b/w file photo of 10 year old twins Brian Thomas Sullivan (left) and Kevin James Sullivan from Islington, London, who carry their luggage to the boat train ‘Rangitoto’ as they leave Liverpool Street station in London bound for Auckland, New Zealand. Britain and Australia are saying sorry to thousands of British children who were promised a better life overseas, only to suffer abuse and neglect thousands of miles from home. The British government said Sunday that Prime Minister Gordon Brown will apologize for 20th-century child migrant programs that saw thousands of poor British children sent to Australia, Canada and other former colonies until the 1960s. Many ended up in institutions or were sent to work as farm laborers. (AP Photo / pa File)

Australia apologizes to Brit kids sent to colonies

Associated Press | Nov 16, 2009

by Rod Mcguirk And Jill Lawless

CANBERRA, Australia – When John Hennessey was 10 years old, he was sent from a war-weary Britain to an orphanage in Australia, where he was told food was plentiful and children rode kangaroos to school.

Instead, he was beaten and sexually abused, leaving him emotionally scarred and with a stutter that persists 60 years later.

“There’s no other country in the world that has deported their children to the other side of the world and then abandoned them,” the 72-year-old said before an emotional ceremony Monday in Australia, where Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized for his country’s role in a shameful episode in British colonial history.

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“They stole our innocence,” he added, calling his caretakers in Australia “a ring of pedophiles.”

Rudd acknowledged the deep wounds inflicted by the programs that sent an estimated 150,000 British children to distant colonies — intending to ease pressure on post-World War II Britain’s social services, provide orphaned or abandoned children with a fresh start and supply the empire with a sturdy supply of white workers. Rudd extended condolences to the 7,000 survivors of the programs who still live in Australia, many of whom grew up in institutions where they were physically and sexually abused or were sent to work as farm laborers.

“We are sorry,” Rudd said. “Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused. Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care. Sorry for the tragedy — the absolute tragedy — of childhoods lost.”

The ceremony at Parliament House comes one day after the British government said Prime Minister Gordon Brown would apologize next year for the child migrant programs, which lasted from 1618 to 1967. After 1920, most of the children went to Australia.

Rudd also apologized to the “forgotten Australians” — children who suffered while in state care during the last century. According to a 2004 Australian Senate report, more than 500,000 children were placed in foster homes, orphanages and other institutions during the 20th century. Many were emotionally, physically and sexually abused.

After Rudd spoke, Hennessey climbed the stage to show the prime minister a framed photograph of his mother, May Mary Hennessey, who handed her 4-week-old son over to nuns at an English Roman Catholic orphanage because she was not married. In 1947, the Irish order of Christian Brothers offered to take care of him and other supposed orphans in Australia.

“They said to us kangaroos will take us to school, there’s food everywhere, and we said: ‘of course we’ll go’ — little did we know it was on the other side of the world,” Hennessey said.

Sparsely populated Australia’s close shave with Japanese invasion during World War II inspired a national motto of “populate or perish” and triggered a wave of Australian government-assisted migration from Europe.

Australia had an immigration policy that favored British and white immigrants until the 1970s.

“The Archbishop met us at Fremantle (in Western Australia),” Hennessey said. “I can still remember his words. He said: ‘Welcome to Australia. We want white stock because we’re terrified of the yellow peril.’”

A 1998 British parliamentary inquiry, meanwhile, noted “a further motive was racist: the importation of ‘good white stock’ was seen as a desirable policy objective in the developing British Colonies.”

When Hennessey arrived in Boys Town orphanage — now an elite private school in the farming village of Bindoon, 55 miles (90 kilometers) north of the western city of Perth — the boys slept for more than a year on thin mattresses and iron beds on verandahs until they built their own dormitories.

“When it rained and was windy, we’d get wet and yet the brothers were inside tucked away in their lovely warm beds,” Hennessey said.

Hennessey said his stutter began with a particularly violent and harrowing assault at the orphanage when he was 12 years old. He was stripped naked and nearly beaten to death by the headmaster for eating grapes he had taken from a vineyard without permission because he was hungry.

“What terrified me most was that in my mind I thought: ‘That’s my father. What’s he doing?’ I had nobody else, and he was the one I’d looked up to,” Hennessey said.

He left Boys Town at the age of 17 and became a house painter and decorator in Campbelltown, 40 miles (70 kilometers) southwest of Sydney on the east coast.

After a 13-year search, he was reunited with his mother in England in 1999, when she was 86. She had eventually married, but three pregnancies subsequent to Hennessey’s birth had ended in miscarriages.

Hennessey said he never told his mother, who died in 2005, about the abuse he’d suffered.

“It was bad enough me not being there, but if she realized I was sexually abused and physically abused, you could image how she’d think because she had a guilt complex,” Hennessey said through reddened eyes.

Andrew Murray, a former Australian senator who was sent from Britain to an orphanage in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, called on Australia to pay reparations.

British High Commissioner Valerie Amos said her government had not yet addressed the compensation question, though Britain has been trying to make amends since the late 1990s by funding trips to reunite migrants with their families in Britain.

Brown’s office said officials would consult with representatives of the surviving children before making a formal apology.

A Chinese official bizarrely claimed that Barack Obama should understand China’s opposition to Tibetan independence because he is a black president who understands Abraham Lincoln’s role in emancipating African Americans.

Obama should understand Chinese rule in Tibet ‘because he is black’, official says

Telegraph | Nov 12, 2009

By Malcolm Moore in Shanghai

China insists that the Communist party liberated Tibetans from feudal serfdom under the Dalai Lama in 1959.

Qin Gang, the foreign ministry spokesman, said that since Mr Obama is a “black president”, the issue of slavery should resonate with him.

“He is a black president, and he understands the slavery abolition movement and Lincoln’s major significance for that movement,” said Mr Qin. “Lincoln played an incomparable role in protecting the national unity and territorial integrity of the United States.”

China’s stance was like Lincoln’s, said Mr Qin.

“Thus on this issue we hope that President Obama, more than any other foreign leader, can better, more deeply grasp China’s stance on protecting national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” he added.

The comments from the foreign ministry came a few days before the American president is due to tour Shanghai and Beijing.

Mr Obama left America for his trip to Asia last night looking to deflect attention from falling popularity at home. A national Gallup opinion poll showed that if asked to vote in a congressional ballot today 48 per cent would choose Republican and 44 per cent Democrat.

The Chinese government is angling for Mr Obama to endorse China’s rule in Tibet publicly, and senior advisers to Mr Obama have admitted that the topic will be on the agenda during talks with Hu Jintao, the Chinese president.

Mr Obama avoided meeting the Dalai Lama when the exiled spiritual leader was in Washington in October, amid rumours that he was keen to avoid upsetting China. However, the Dalai Lama has said that they may meet after Mr Obama’s trip to China.

Pro-Tibetan independence groups immediately condemned the Foreign ministry for “failing a history test”.

Stephanie Brigden, the director of Free Tibet, said: “It is an insult for the unelected and authoritarian Chinese government to suggest that an instinctive democrat such as Abraham Lincoln would have sided with China in seeking to deny the Tibetan people their fundamental right to determine their own future.

“By trying to be clever, and attempting to liken its occupation of Tibet with Lincoln’s fight to abolish slavery while preserving the Union, China has merely underlined its inability to recognise what true freedom looks like.”

_________

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Everyone in Britain could be given a personal ‘carbon allowance’

Everyone in Britain should have an annual carbon ration and be penalised if they use too much fuel, the head of the Environment Agency will say.

Telegraph | Nov 9, 2009

Lord Smith of Finsbury believes that implementing individual carbon allowances for every person will be the most effective way of meeting the targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

It would involve people being issued with a unique number which they would hand over when purchasing products that contribute to their carbon footprint, such as fuel, airline tickets and electricity.

Like with a bank account, a statement would be sent out each month to help people keep track of what they are using.

If their “carbon account” hits zero, they would have to pay to get more credits.

Those who are frugal with their carbon usage will be able to sell their unused credits and make a profit.

Lord Smith will call for the scheme to be part of a “Green New Deal” to be introduced within 20 years when he addresses the agency’s annual conference on Monday.

An Environment Agency spokesman said only those with “extravagant lifestyles” would be affected by the carbon allowances.

He said: “A lot of people who cycle will get money back. It will probably only be bankers and those with extravagant lifestyles who would lose out.”

However, some have criticised the move as “Orwellian” and say it will have a detrimental impact on business.

Ruth Lea, an economist from Arbuthnot Banking Group, told the Daily Mail: “This is all about control of the individual and you begin to wonder whether this is what the green agenda has always been about. It’s Orwellian. This will be an enormous tax on business.”

Under the Climate Change Act, Britain is obliged to cut its emissions by 80 per cent on 1990 levels by 2050. This means annual CO2 emissions per person will have to fall from about 9 tonnes to only 2 tonnes.

David Miscavige, leader of the Church of Scientology. Photograph: Luke MacGregor/Reuters

Florida newspaper exposé reveals allegations of campaign to gather information on high-level defectors

Former Scientology members tell of group’s efforts to track them down

Guardian | Nov 3, 2009

In the latest chapter of an extraordinary exposé of the Church of Scientology, the St Petersburg Times has described the group’s strenuous efforts to track down and bring back members who try to leave.

Former Scientology members have told the Florida newspaper of being pursued and detained, cut off from family and friends and subjected to months of interrogation, humiliation and manual labour. What is particularly damaging is that these allegations come from former high-ranking Scientology officials who allegedly coordinated the intelligence gathering and supervised the retrieval of staff at the behest of the church’s leader.

The latest instalment of the series – What Happened in Vegas – includes detailed allegations of a campaign to gather information on a group of high-level defectors.

According to the paper, two couples and a man who left in 1990 to set up a mortgage business in Las Vegas were infiltrated by a mole who would send reports on the group to the church’s office of special affairs’ (OSA) intelligence unit back in Hollywood.

The church’s alleged interest in the group’s activities had to do with the two women, who were sisters. Terri and Janis Gillham were two of the original four “messengers” for L Ron Hubbard, the pulp novelist who founded Scientology. As his messengers they fetched people for private audiences and carried his handwritten notes – bulletins in red ink and policy orders in green.

For the story, the St Peterburg Times interviewed high-ranking defectors, including Mike Rinder, the former director of OSA, and Marty Rathbun, the former inspector general of the Religious Technology Centre, the church’s top ecclesiastical authority. A Scientology spokesman “categorically denied” that Miscavige knew about or was involved in the pursuit of runaways or spying on former members.

The Church of Scientology has been battered by negative publicity in the last few days. Last week one of the most high-profile members, Hollywood film-maker Paul Haggis, quit the organisation in protest at its stance on same-sex marriages. In an explosive letter of resignation, Haggis claimed he could no longer “be a member of an organisation where gay-bashing is tolerated”.

On this side of the Atlantic two flagship branches of the church in France were ordered to pay fines of over €600,000 (£550,000) after being convicted of “fraud in an organised gang” by a court in Paris. The latest piece from the St Petersburg Times just piles on the bad publicity for the church founded by Hubbard in 1952.

Hamid Karzai approved a hard-line law, which critics fear could legalise rape

Scotsman | Aug 15,  2009

By Jonathon Burch in Kabul

HUMAN rights campaigners have accused president Hamid Karzai of “selling out” Afghan women by ratifying a Shiite law – which critics fear will legalise rape – ahead of next week’s election.

The New York-based group Human Rights Watch (HRW) yesterday discovered that an amended version of the controversial Personal Status Law quietly came into effect on 27 July, when it was published in the official gazette.

The legislation is meant to govern family law for minority Muslim Shiites, who make up about 15 per cent of Afghanistan’s 30 million population, and is different to rules for the majority Sunni population.

It requires Shia women to satisfy their husband’s sexual appetites, an article which critics have said could be used to justify marital rape.

Mr Karzai, who approved the legislation earlier this year, was forced to review the decision after western leaders said the “abhorrent” laws harked back to Taleban-era restrictions and Afghan women’s rights groups protested on the streets.

Mr Karzai has previously said western concerns about the law were “inappropriate” and may have been based on “misinterpretations” but promised last April to make changes if it was found to violate the constitution.

However, HRW says the amended law still contains some of its “most repressive” articles that directly contravene the Afghan constitution, which bans any kind of discrimination and distinction between citizens.

A copy of the final law seen by HRW enshrines a husband’s right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to obey his sexual demands, and requires women to get permission from their husbands to work.

It also grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers and effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying “blood money” to a girl who was injured when he raped her.

Brad Adams, Asia director for HRW, said: “Karzai has made an unthinkable deal to sell Afghan women out in return for the support of fundamentalists in the 20 August election. So much for any credentials he claimed as a moderate on women’s issues.

“These kinds of barbaric laws were supposed to have been relegated to the past with the overthrow of the Taleban in 2001, yet Karzai has revived them and given them his official stamp of approval.”

Fatemeh Hosseini, an Afghan women’s rights activist, said Karzai had been pressured by both sides but in the end had given in to conservative Muslim clerics.

“Karzai promised he would make changes and he has brought changes. But the changes are only in the wording, the context is the same,” she said.

“Karzai is trying to please both sides but for them, the mullahs are more important than women,” she said.

HRW has demanded the Afghan parliament overturns the law and has called on presidential candidates to amend or repeal it.

“Afghanistan’s parliament should overturn this law, and its constitutional court should throw out provisions that violate the constitution and its international legal obligations,” said Mr Adams.

Mr Karzai signed the Shia Personal Status Law in March, prompting a national and international storm of protest. The law also regulates divorce, separation, inheritance, and the minimum age for marriage.

The law was designed in secret by a powerful and hard-line Shia leader, Ayatollah Asif Mohseni, and supported by conservative Shia leaders in parliament.

In a rare move, Afghan women took to the streets in April to protest, braving threats and violence.

After many world leaders condemned the legislation, Mr Karzai submitted the law to a consultation process with civil society groups in May.

Supporters of General Mohamed Ould Abdelaziz Photo: AFP/GETTY

More than half a million slaves are at the heart of a presidential election battle in the former French colony of Mauritania.

Telegraph | Jul 11, 2009

By Nick Meo in Nouakchott, Mauritania

A year after she ran away from her master, Barakatu Mint Sayed prays that the election on July 18 will mark the beginning of the end of slavery in Mauritania.

Her nation is one of the last places on Earth where large numbers of humans are still kept as property.

And like thousands of other slaves and freed slaves across the Saharan country, her hopes are fixed on an inspirational candidate, a man born to slave parents who has sworn to put an end to the practice of “owning” humans if he is elected president.

That candidate is Messaoud Ould Boulkheir, a 66-year-old former civil servant with a strong resemblance to the film actor Morgan Freeman. Mr Boulkheir has vowed that in power he would punish slave owners and do everything he can to free their human property.

His prospects of winning power are growing by the day – and he is being hailed as Mauritania’s brightest star by his supporters.

“He is the Obama of Mauritania,” said Boubacar Messaoud, an architect and veteran anti-slavery campaigner in the northwest African desert state. “He is going to bring change, and he represents social justice and equality.”

Officially, slavery has long been abolished in Mauritania, but the law has never been enforced and there are an estimated 600,000 slaves, almost one in five of the country’s 3.2 million people, almost 150 years since the American civil war.

Change will come too late to heal Mrs Sayed’s ruined life. But she knows that victory for Mr Boulkheir could transform the future for the daughter and grandchildren whom she had to leave behind in captivity when she finally summoned the courage to escape.

A black African of Mauritania’s Haratine caste, she was born into slavery about 40 years ago – she is illiterate and has only a hazy idea of time – and grew up as the property of an Arabic-speaking Berber family, in an oasis town deep in the desert.

While her master’s children went to school, she was cooking, cleaning and washing from dawn to dusk. She slept on the floor, and suffered beatings.

“Sometimes I was too tired by the end of the day to eat my food,” Mrs Sayed said at her new home in the capital, Nouakchott, where she now works as a paid housekeeper.

Aged about 10, she was separated from her mother by being given to a cousin of the master as a wedding gift. She remembers crying uncontrollably when they moved to a different town, where she was forbidden from leaving the master’s house.

Another 20 years later she was separated from her own daughter, Mulkheir, when the girl was given away as a teenager – a common trauma for slave families.

Mrs Sayed has never seen her three young grandchildren or met her daughter’s husband. In fact she is not sure whether her daughter even has a husband, or whether Mulkheir’s children were fathered by her master.

It is the kind of life that has been endured for centuries by Mauritania’s slaves, since the first marauding Berber raiders rode out of the desert from the north in the 3rd century to carry off African villagers.

The former slave who would be president believes he can finally bring such suffering to an end.

“All that is needed to free the slaves is willpower,” Mr Boulkheir told The Sunday Telegraph at his modest home in the capital.

A quietly spoken man with a commanding presence, he has a clean reputation in an Islamic nation which has suffered years of corrupt rulers.

The acting president and head of the senate, Ba Mamadou Mbare, is not contesting the election. Of his nine rival candidates, the man Mr Boulkheir has to beat is the self-appointed president of the Higher State Council, General Mohammed Ould Abdelaziz, who led a military coup last year and is the most powerful man in the country. He is the Arabic-speaking former head of security for Ould Taya – the deposed dictator who was driven out by an earlier coup in 2005 and now lives in exile.

Gen Abdelaziz – who has removed his uniform to contest the election in line with the constitution – and his political opponents including Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, the president he deposed last year, agreed to the polls in a deal brokered by Senegal.

The junta and its opponents had come under intense pressure from the international community to re-establish a democratic government, with the United Nations, European Union and African Union co-sponsoring the mediation.

Gen Abdelaziz’s enemies stop short of claiming that he owns slaves – he was in fact born in poverty and inherited nothing. But they insist that there are slave-owning masters among the ranks of his wealthy supporters.

The two candidates despise each other. Their electoral battle, a novelty in a ramshackle capital which is more used to coups, has enthused its residents, as much as anyone can be enthused in temperatures of 43 degrees centigrade.

Its streets, where sand drifts across the tarmac, are plastered with posters, and nomadic-style tents have been erected in every suburb. Blaring loudspeakers praise the rival candidates at such volume that passing camels and donkeys pulling carts are sent into a panic. With six days to go, diplomats consider the race too close to call.

The votes of slaves who have been registered by their masters may make a critical difference. But campaigners fear that in the great swathes of the country’s dusty hinterland where most of the slaves are kept, thousands will be compelled to cast their votes for Gen Abdelaziz.

Mr Boulkheir’s camp hopes it can pull ahead by energising the freed Haratine – the slave caste which has grown in size and clout in recent years, especially in the cities, as slaves have gradually been freed or run away. Once free, they can join the workforce. Fishing, desert agriculture and iron and gold mining and are the main sources of income for Mauritanians, who on average earn little more than $2 a day, although that could rise if offshore oil exploration ever proves fruitful.

Mr Boulkheir also enjoys the kudos of having being jailed three times by Mauritania’s former military dictatorship for advocating democracy when that looked impossible in the 1990s.

Arabic-speakers as well as black Africans back his bid for power, attracted by his promise of building democracy after years of economic stagnation under military misrule and a chaotic series of coups. He is regarded as the candidate with the best chance of ending conflict between the black majority and the Berber ruling elite. Slave-holding has been abolished three times, first by the country’s former French overlords and then twice by different rulers of the independent state, most recently in 2007. But the law has never been enforced and no slave owner has ever been prosecuted.

“Many slaves have been freed in Mauritania now, and if I am elected I will speed up the process,” Mr Boulkheir said. “Slave owners will be punished, for the first time in our history. Justice will be implemented.

“I will do everything in my power to end this curse of slavery.”

In this, he has a deeply personal motivation. Soon after he was born his mother was beaten almost to death by the master from whom his parents had run away. They only managed to escape to freedom because of help from the French authorities.

Their son overcame the handicap of his birth to find a job as a civil servant and rise to a senior rank.

He knows that ending slavery will not prove easy, especially in the vastness of the Sahara where pastoralists and nomads endure a harsh existence which has barely been touched by the modern world.

Not all slaves suffer abuse. If they are lucky, masters feed and care for them as if they are family members, albeit inferior ones, and they will eat and pray with their slaves.

In bondage, the Haratine work as labourers: herding animals; working in date groves; or doing the household chores while the master’s family laze around.

Centuries of indoctrination have persuaded the Sahara’s captives that slavery is religiously ordained – slaves are taught that if they run away they will be barred from heaven. As a local saying puts it: “Paradise is under your master’s foot.” In some remote places a runaway will still be hunted down by nomad masters.

If they are brave enough, boys do often escape when they reach their late teens, but for women and children it is much harder. They know that with no skills or education a life of hunger or prostitution is the realistic alternative to captivity, and many escaped slaves return to their masters to beg forgiveness.

In the oasis towns of the desert masters are still powerful, but after 20 years of international pressure – and encouraged by such Western organisations as Anti-Slavery International, which help local campaigners to challenge the entrenched culture – few are prepared to discuss slavery openly.

A Berber driver, who would only give his first name, Mohammed, defended slavery. “It is our religion and custom,” he said.

“Why does the international community try to stop it? The slaves are better off with their masters. This is their fate. When they leave, they starve.”

Also requires new evaluation of ‘mandatory’ service for all

WorldNetDaily | Mar 19, 2009

By Bob Unruh

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a plan to set up a new “volunteer corps” and consider whether “a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people” should be developed.

The legislation also refers to “uniforms” that would be worn by the “volunteers” and the “need” for a “public service academy, a 4-year institution” to “focus on training” future “public sector leaders.” The training, apparently, would occur at “campuses.”

The vote yesterday came on H.R. 1388, which reauthorizes through 2014 the National and Community Service Act of 1990 and the Domestic Volunteer Service Act of 1973, acts that originally, among other programs, funded the AmeriCorps and the National Senior Service Corps.

It not only reauthorizes the programs, but also includes “new programs and studies” and is expected to be funded with an allocation of $6 billion over the next five years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Many, however, are raising concerns that the program, which is intended to include 250,000 “volunteers,” is the beginning of what President Obama called his “National Civilian Security Force” in a a speech last year in which he urged creating an organization as big and well-funded as the U.S. military. He has declined since then to elaborate.

WND reported when a copy of the speech provided online apparently was edited to exclude Obama’s specific references to the new force.

The video of his statements is posted here:

The new bill specifically references the possibilities “if all individuals in the United States were expected to perform national service or were required to perform a certain amount of national service.”

Such new requirements perhaps, the legislation notes, “would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.”

No one, apparently with the exception of infants, would be excluded:

“The means to develop awareness of national service and volunteer opportunities at a young age by creating, expanding, and promoting service options for elementary and secondary school students, through service learning or other means, and by raising awareness of existing incentives.”

According to a report by Canada Free Press, “‘volunteerism’ that kept America running since the days of its founding” would be “wiped out with the stroke of a pen.”

“It becomes forced labor and like the practice of another era, presses American citizens of all ages and creeds, unknowingly into military service,” the commentary said.

“On paper, H.R. 1388 is the ‘Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act’; the more innocuous sounding ‘The Give Act,’ for short.

“The Give Act puts the finishing touches to Public Allies New Leadership for New Times, modeled after Saul Alinsky’s ‘Peoples Organizations’ and operating under Michelle Obama,” the commentary said.

“Michelle was also a pioneer in the social entrepreneur movement – leaders who create new approaches and organize to provide new solutions to social problems. Like most things Saul Alinsky, H.R. 1388 sounds noble in stating why wide-sweeping change is necessary,” the commentary said.

“H.R. 1388 goes straight to the heart of volunteerism in America, impacting everything from the lemonade stands of neighborhood children, to the residents of senior citizens homes. … The Give Act puts tow-headed school children and silver-haired seniors in the official uniform of the new State, and encompasses every walk of life in main-street America,” the commentary said. “Whether you are young or old, or firmly believe that volunteering means you are offering your time to the good of community work, you will be pressed into Obama’s National Civilian Community Corps.”

Groups of such “volunteers,” would, under the legislation, be “grouped together as appropriate in campuses for operational, support, and boarding purposes. The Corps campus for a unit shall be in a facility or central location established as the operational headquarters and boarding place for the unit. … There shall be a superintendent for each camp.”

The plan generated this concern from Resistnet.com: “This is the equivalent of brown shirts.”

Another portion of the bill talks about a “service learning” plan that will be “a mandatory part of the curriculum in all of the secondary schools served by the local educational agency.”

A forum participant noted, “I wonder what’s going to happen to those who refused to ‘volunteer.’ Maybe they will be put into a different ‘campus.’ I guess we will soon find out.”

Formal announcements about the plan suggested something far different, picking a provision far down in the 200 pages of legislation to highlight.

According to a Business Wire statement released by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the bill “would formally authorize federal support for establishing the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on America as a National Day of Service and Remembrance.”

That provision is tucked into the far reaches of the legislation, but Schumer discussed it as if it were the primary point.

“I could not be more proud to work to pass this important provision,” said Schumer. “September 11 should not only be a day for mourning – it should be a day to think about our neighbors, our community, and our country. We can take a tragic day in our nation’s history and turn it into a force for good.”

On the Albany Insanity blog, this concern was raised: “What gives the government the right to require individuals to give three years service under the guise of ‘volunteer’ service? It is not explicit exactly who is required but I think they get the bill passed and then iron out the details. It talks about uniforms and ‘camps.’ They revise the word ‘camps’ and call it ‘campus.’ There is language about Seniors and Community organizations.”

The blog noted, such work forces would be used for “pressing national and local challenges” that apparently could range from weather disasters to economic uncertainty.

At a Republican website, officials noted it authorizes funding for an Education Corps, Healthy Futures Corps, Clean Energy Corps, Veterans’ Corps and Opportunity Corps.

The bill was sponsored by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, a Democrat from New York. It was approved in the House 321-105, with mostly GOP opposition. It now goes to the Senate.

WND reported earlier on Obama’s Colorado Springs campaign speech when he sought a civilian security force as big and well-funded as the military – with a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars.

WND later reported when the official website for Obama, Change.gov, announced he would “require” all middle school through college students to participate in community service programs.

However, after a flurry of blogs protested children being drafted into Obama’s proposed youth corps, officials softened the website’s wording.

Originally, under the tab “America Serves,” Change.gov read, “President-Elect Obama will expand national service programs like AmeriCorps and Peace Corps and will create a new Classroom Corps to help teachers in under served schools, as well as a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, and Veterans Corps.

“Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year,” the site announced.

WND previously reported on a video of a marching squad of Obama youth.

Joseph Farah, founder and editor of WND, used his daily column first to raise the issue and then to elevate it with a call to all reporters to start asking questions.

“If we’re going to create some kind of national police force as big, powerful and well-funded as our combined U.S. military forces, isn’t this rather a big deal?” Farah wrote. “I thought Democrats generally believed the U.S. spent too much on the military. How is it possible their candidate is seeking to create some kind of massive but secret national police force that will be even bigger than the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force put together?

“Is Obama serious about creating some kind of domestic security force bigger and more expensive than that? If not, why did he say it? What did he mean?” Farah wrote.

The real cost of EU membership for British taxpayers is ten times higher than figures quoted by the European Commission suggest, it has been claimed.

Telegraph | Mar 18, 2009

Real cost of EU is ten times higher than EC figures show, Taxpayers’ Alliance says

By Martin Banks in Brussels

According to the Taxpayers’ Alliance, EU membership costs every Briton £2,000 per year, compared with the £220 quoted by the EU.

The UK-based lobby group says that, annually, the total cost of British membership of the 27-member club is £118 billion.

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European MPs fleecing taxpayers for up to £1 million each in illicit profits per term

This contrasts sharply with Commission statistics which show that in 2007, the most recent year for which figures are available, Britain’s net contribution to the EU totalled some £3.8 billion.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance bases its figures on what it considers the “real, underestimated and hidden” costs of EU membership.

These include Britain’s direct contributions to the EU, the cost to UK business of complying with and administering EU regulations, EU administration costs and also higher food prices, said to result from implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy and Common Fisheries Policy.

The claims are made in a new Taxpayers’ Alliance booklet, entitled “The Great European Rip-Off.”

Its co-author, Matthew Elliott, the organisation’s CEO, said: “The book tries to find a total cost of the EU but does not suggest that it is all waste or that it could be eliminated overnight.

“However, an estimate of the total cost provides an important guide to the burden placed on member countries’ economies and their citizens due to EU membership.”

The Commission said it uses “totally” different data based solely on Britain’s direct contributions to the EU. A spokesman said that in 2007 Britain’s net contribution to the EU was 4.1 billion euros (£3.8 billion), or 0.21 per cent of the country’s GNI.

“Whatever anyone else says, we stick by these figures,” she said.

Shadowy multibillion-dollar industry far more widespread than expected

MSNBC | Dec 22, 2008

By Alex Johnson and Cesar Rodriguez

When FBI and immigration agents arrested a 28-year-old Guatemalan woman three months ago in Los Angeles, they announced that they had shut down one of the most elaborate sex trafficking rings in the country. It was also the family business.

The woman, Maribel Rodriguez Vasquez, was the sixth member of her family to be rounded up in the two-year multi-agency investigation. Vasquez, five of her relatives and three other Guatemalan nationals were charged with 50 counts, alleging that they lured at least a dozen young women — including five minors as young as 13 years old — to the United States with promises of good jobs, only to put them to work as prostitutes. All remain in custody as investigators attempt to unravel the complex case.

Vasquez — quickly dubbed the “L.A. Madam” — attracted attention because she had been featured on the fugitive-hunting television program “America’s Most Wanted.” But it was one of only a few such cases to be spotlighted by national media, contributing to the false impression that cases of immigrant sex trafficking are isolated incidents, law enforcement officials and advocates for immigrants say.

The reality is that human trafficking goes on in nearly every American city and town, said Lisette Arsuaga, director of development for the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, a human rights organization in Los Angeles.

“Human trafficking is well hidden,” Arsuaga said. “I consider it a huge problem.”

Her assessment is shared by authorities in Bexar County, Texas, where the Sheriff’s Office has formed a task force with Shared Hope International, an anti-slavery organization founded by former Rep. Linda Smith, D-Wash. Bexar County is considered a crossroads of the cross-border Mexican sex slave trade because two Interstate highways that crisscross the state intersect there, some 150 miles from the Mexican border.

“I could go to a truck stop in South Texas right now and get on a CB radio and ask for some sweet stuff, and someone’s going to come out and offer something to sell,” Sheriff’s Deputy Chris Burchell said.

A $9.5 billion-a-year industry

Federal officials agree that the trafficking of human beings as sex slaves is far more prevalent than is popularly understood. While saying it is difficult to pinpoint the scope of the industry, given its shadowy nature, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials estimated that it likely generates more than $9.5 billion a year.

Last year alone, the FBI opened more than 225 human trafficking investigations in the United States. Figures for 2008 are not yet available, but in a coordinated nationwide sweep in July, federal, state and local authorities made more than 640 arrests and rescued 47 children in just three days.

In congressional testimony this year, FBI Director Robert Mueller called sex trafficking “a significant and persistent problem in the U.S. and around the world.”

Most cases involve “international persons trafficked to the United States from other countries,” who are generally less aware of their rights, probably do not speak English and are frightened to go to the authorities, he said. “Victims are often lured with false promises of good jobs and better lives and are then forced to work in the sex industry.”

While an increasing number of young men and boys are being forced into the commercial sex industry, more than 80 percent of victims are women and girls, the State Department estimated this year. Of those, 70 percent are forced into prostitution, stripping, pornography or mail-order marriage.

That allegedly was the case with the L.A. Madam.

Prosecutors said in court documents that the Vasquez ring sold Guatemalan women and girls to one another like slaves for several years. Ring members also would try to keep them in line by taking them to witch doctors who threatened to put curses on them and their families if they ran away, the prosecution said.

In one incident, three of the defendants repeatedly kicked and hit one of the victims to punish her for trying to escape, the documents allege.

“These young women were enticed into coming to this country by promises of the American dream, only to arrive and discover that what awaited was a nightmare,” said Robert Schoch, an ICE special agent.

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