A North Carolina state legislator says he supports the military, but a flyer prepared by his campaign could lead some to question which country’s.

Democrat Tim Spear’s campaign has apologised after inadvertently sending voters a leaflet showing actors in World War II-era German uniforms.

The firm that produced the advert touting his support for the military has accepted blame, US media reported.

The state Republican Party obtained the flyer and distributed it to the media.

A luxury resort in the Maldives has sparked outrage after a video appeared on You Tube showing members of staff abusing and mocking their guests using a language they were unable to understand.

Employees at the Vilu Reef Beach and Spa resort can be seen calling an English-speaking couple ‘infidel’ and ‘swine’ and calling their guests’ marriage illegal in their native Dhivehi tongue throughout the 15-minute wedding ceremony.

According to the Maldive news service Minivan News, the video which was uploaded to You Tube ‘as a joke’ shows an employee named Hussein Didi conducting a service as a ‘celebrant’ – a person who is empowered to perform a religious ceremony.
…

‘Fornication has been legalised according to Article six, 1.11 of the Penal Code’, he chants in a tone favoured by religious scholars. ‘That is, frequent fornication by homosexuals. Most fornication is by males,’ he continues.

‘You are swine. The children that you bear from this marriage will all be bastard swine,’ he says to his guests.

‘Your marriage is not a valid one. You are not the kind of people who can have a valid marriage. One of you is an infidel. The other, too, is an infidel – and we have reason to believe – an atheist, who does not even believe in an infidel religion.’

A politician tipped as a future Japanese prime minister has said the British are not very likeable, but admitted the way British prisoners marched in The Bridge on the River Kwai demonstrated their best qualities.

Ichiro Ozawa, the former secretary-general of Japan’s ruling Democratic Party, also said he values US democracy but dismissed the American people as “simple-minded”.

The 68-year-old veteran politician, who resigned as the second most important official in the ruling party in June after coming under fire for campaign finance scandals, reportedly said: “I don’t like British people,” before praising British democracy and their discipline, citing the 1957 Second World War II film, The Bridge on the River Kwai, in which British prisoners of war march in orderly ranks.

The film, based on the novel The Bridge over the River Kwai starred Sir Alec Guinness, William Holden and Jack Hawkins. Guinness won an Oscar for his portrayal of Colonel Nicholson, who convinces the other British prisoners of war to build a bridge for the Burma-Siam railway as a means of boosting British morale but which eventually turns into a monument to himself.

The film won six other Academy Awards including Best Picture.

Veterans of the Second World War who fought against Japan said Mr Ozawa’s comments about Britain were insensitive but they would “not get into a sweat about it”.

A Perth Catholic school has apologised to parents who were offended by a Year 4 student pretending to be Adolf Hitler being awarded first place in his class at a school dress-up day.

The inner-city school sent out a letter of apology on Wednesday after parents complained about the boy’s character portrayal at a book-week assembly.

The principal said a handful of parents had approached or emailed him after the event to say the costume, which included a swastika, should not have been allowed in the school.

Children had been asked to dress up as a famous character. “He (Hitler) was a fairly famous person,” he said. Two children from each class were judged as having the best costumes.

The principal was one of a group of teachers who decided who would win. He said claims that other children had been chanting “Hitler” while the student was on stage were untrue.

“It was a form of voting,” he said. “I would strongly deny that the children were chanting ‘Hitler’, I take strong umbrage to that.”

Other characters’ names were also called out as part of the voting process.

“Some people got upset because kids called out Hitler,” he said. The principal said he did not see anything “sinister” in the student’s choice of character.

“To me it’s a mountain out of a molehill,” he said.

A LEADING German Social Democrat has written a book with an apocalyptic vision of his country sliding into poverty, stupidity and Muslim domination.

Thilo Sarrazin, 65, a former Berlin finance minister and current Bundesbank board member, is already under investigation by a public prosecutor for allegedly inciting racial hatred by blaming immigrants for making Germany “dumber” and calling Muslim children “underclass citizens.”

Now his book, Germany is destroying itself: How we are gambling with our country, threatens the strained social fabric of the “multi-culti” Fatherland once more at a time of rising racial tensions and the radicalisation of Islamic youth.

“I don’t want the country of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to become, in large part, Muslim, that over wide areas Turkish and Arabic are spoken, where the women wear headscarves and the daily rhythms of life are dictated by the call of the Muezzin,” he writes.

Immigrants are making Germany ‘dumber’, according to a board member of the country’s central bank.

 Thilo Sarrazin claimed the ‘limited education’ of immigrants – coupled with their high birth rate – meant Germans ‘are becoming dumber in a simple way’.

He said: ‘There’s a difference in the reproduction of population groups with varying intelligence.’

It is not the first time the 65-year-old member of the Bundesbank has caused controversy since he joined last year.

In October he described Muslim children as ‘underclass’ citizens.

‘I don’t have to accept someone who lives off a state they reject, doesn’t properly take care of the education of his children-and keeps producing more little girls in headscarves,’ Mr Sarrazin said.

‘That goes for 70 percent of the Turkish and 90 percent of the Arabic population of Berlin.’

He added that they were not fit for much other than ‘fruit and vegetable selling’.

The leader of a far-right party that won 16.7 per cent of votes in the Hungarian elections has pledged to “eradicate Gypsy crime”.

Gabor Vona, the head of Jobbik, also pledged “very distinct and very spectacular politics”.

He said that he would wear the uniform of the Magyar Garda (Hungarian Guard), Jobbik’s banned uniformed wing, at the opening of Parliament.

After a series of court cases the Garda has been declared illegal and police have arrested its members at public gatherings.

Viktor Orban, the leader of the centre-right Fidesz — and almost certain to be the country’s next Prime Minister — said in response that Hungary was a country of law and order, and that any breaches of the law would be firmly dealt with.

Heads turned during the filming of singer Erykah Badu’s latest music video, “Window Seat”

The video was shot in and around Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.

In it, Dallas native Badu walks down Elm Street while stripping her clothes off one piece at a time – until she’s fully nude.

Elm Street is the place where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Badu walks between several people on the street, and a few can be seen staring at her as she strolls and strips.

You can watch the video on her site.

It’s slightly NSFW, although parts of her body have been blurred out.

Badu is completely nude as she approaches the spot on Elm where Kennedy was shot (which is marked with an “X” on the pavement).

The sound of a gunshot can be heard and Badu collapses as if she has been shot.

Wal-Mart officials are looking at security tapes after an announcement was made for “all black people” to leave a store in South Jersey.

A man used the public-address system at the Route 42 store in Washington Township Sunday night and calmly announced: “Attention Wal-Mart customers: All black people leave the store now.”

Patricia Covington and Shelia Ellington were inside the store when it happened and told the Courier Post that customers and store employees looked stuneed when they heard it.

“In 2010, I want to know why such statements are being made because it flies in the face of what we teach them [our kids] at home, and that’s tolerance for people,” said Ellington.

Ellington and other customers let store management and police know they were upset. They asked the store to use the same announcement system to apologize to customers that night, which it did.

Three teachers at a South Los Angeles elementary school have been suspended for allegedly encouraging students to celebrate O.J. Simpson, Dennis Rodman and RuPaul for Black History Month, officials said Wednesday.

Children at Wadsworth Avenue Elementary School were carrying pictures of the men at a parade Friday on the school playground, said Los Angeles Unified School District spokeswoman Gayle Pollard-Terry.

She said Supt. Ramon C. Cortines learned about the incident Tuesday and had the teachers, who are white, pulled from their classrooms pending an investigation.

The suspension is without pay for the first three days.

“The superintendent believes there are better choices,” she said.

Minority students at the University of California San Diego declared a racial state of emergency yesterday, presenting administrators with a list of 32 demands — many of which the school accepted on the spot.

Students, already upset by an off-campus party Monday that mocked Black History Month, reacted with tears, outrage and a march across campus after a second racially charged episode.

In the latest incident, members of an irreverent student organization aired a live segment on closed-circuit television Thursday night supporting the party.

Campus officials have been unable to locate a tape of the broadcast. According to the Black Student Union, hosts of the show called critics of the party ungrateful and used a derogatory term for African-Americans.
…
In years past, Koala TV has been temporarily unplugged at least once for airing pornographic material. The Koala publication has poked fun at Muslims, Latinos and Asians for years, and has been repeatedly criticized by the administration. The editor of the publication, Kris Gregorian, declined to comment unless offered beer.

A Ugandan pastor who screened same-sex pornography in a church to try to bolster support for proposed anti-homosexuality legislation has been condemned by gay rights groups.

Martin Ssempa, one of the main backers of a bill that would impose the death penalty for some offenders, aired the explicit slideshow to several hundred people during a church service in Kampala yesterday.

Explaining his decision to display the images, the evangelical preacher said it was necessary to educate people “about what homosexuals do”.

He told the BBC’s Network Africa programme: “In Africa, what you do in your bedroom affects our clan, it affects our tribe, it affects our nation.”

While Ssempa represents the extreme end of widely held homophobic views in Uganda, he does carry strong influence.

On his website he describes himself as “consultant to the government of Uganda”, and his congregants yesterday included David Bahati, the MP who submitted the private member’s bill to parliament last year.

Administrators at the University of California, San Diego are condemning a weekend ghetto-themed party thrown off-campus by fraternity students to mock Black History Month, but they aren’t likely to discipline anyone, it was reported Wednesday.

The so-called “Compton Cookout” event urged all participants to wear chains, don cheap clothes and speak very loudly, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Female participants were encouraged to be “ghetto chicks.”

“It’s insulting, it’s derogatory, we’re being made fun of, we’re being made a mockery of and we’re not being taken seriously,” said UCSD student Elize Diop, who is black.

The invitation read, “For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks — Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes …,” the Union-Tribune reported.

Italy’s agriculture minister defended his sponsorship of McDonald’s new all-Italian burger Monday amid criticism that he is selling out to a multinational corporation and sacrificing Italy’s culinary reputation in the process.

Minister Luca Zaia has argued that McDonald’s new McItaly burger — using all Italian beef, Asiago cheese and artichoke spread — will pump €3.5 million ($4.8 million) more a month into the pockets of Italian farmers grappling with tough economic times.

But for a country that gave birth to the Slow Food movement a quarter-century ago and prides itself on its varied, delicious and healthy cuisine, Zaia’s enthusiastic support of McDonald’s has been hard to swallow.

It didn’t help that Zaia and McDonald’s executives launched the new burger last month at McDonald’s flagship restaurant in Rome’s historic center near the Spanish Steps, the chain’s first Italian outpost.

The opening of those Golden Arches in 1986 famously inspired a relatively unknown Turin foodie, Carlo Petrini, to launch what became Slow Food — the international movement that embraces local, organic food and home cooking over fast food and the industrialized food chain.

A collection of speeches by Benito Mussolini has become an unlikely and controversial hit on the internet.

The speeches, the last of which was delivered in 1938 when Italy introduced laws which discriminated against Jews, are the second-most downloaded application on the Italian version of Apple’s iTunes website.

The popularity of the application, called iMussolini, caused outrage among some Italians in the week that the country commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day – the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces.

The website was inundated with comments condemning the continuing fascination with Mussolini and a member of the Italian Communist Party called the application “disgraceful”.

It contains 100 of Il Duce’s speeches and can be bought for 79 euro cents, or 68 pence. It was downloaded more than a video game based on the blockbuster science fiction film Avatar.

When things looked their darkest for Gov. Mark Sandford — when he was in danger of being impeached for running off to Argentina to see his mistress — his best insurance policy may well have been South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Andre Bauer.

Lawmakers knew if they removed Sanford, they would end up with Bauer, a fiercely ambitious Republican with a reputation for reckless and immature behavior.

Now Bauer has folks shaking their heads again, after he likened government assistance to the poor to feeding stray animals.

At a town hall meeting Thursday, Bauer, who is running for governor in his own right now that Sanford is term-limited, said: “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed! You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that.”

The mayor of Moscow, known for his overtly homophobic statements, said Monday that he would never allow a gay pride parade in the city, calling it “Satanic” and saying marchers should be punished.

“A gay parade… cannot be called anything but a Satanic act,” Yury Luzhkov told an education conference, quoted by Interfax news agency.

“We haven’t permitted such a parade and we won’t permit it in the future.” Luzhkov called for gay marchers to be punished.

“It’s high time that we stop propagating nonsense discussions about human rights, and bring to bear on them the full force and justice of the law,” he said.

Gay rights campaigner Nikolai Alexeyev reaffirmed that plans for this year’s gay pride parade will go ahead despite the ban.

“We don’t plan to make any changes. We still plan to hold a gay parade on May 29,” Alexeyev told AFP.

It’s a small sign igniting a big debate.

An official state of Colorado Adopt-a-Highway placard announcing that a one-mile long stretch of US Highway 85 is sponsored not by the Boy Scouts or the Lions Club, but by the Nazi Party of Colorado.

Members call themselves the National Socialist Movement. They are inspired by teachings of Hitler, believe interracial relationships and homosexuality should be crimes, and they want to start a separate all-white country.

The Adopt-a-Highway program, they say, is a good PR move for them and a recruiting tool.

“We want to let them know that we’re here and we do good things,” Unit leader Neal Land told FOX 31 News.

“We’re upstanding citizens, try to be good people, and try to portray ourselves that way.”

Two of Russia’s champion ice skaters have caused outrage after dressing as Aborigines for a competition.

The couple, who are favored to win gold at next month’s winter Olympics, wear skin-toned suits with red loin cloths, white body paint and eucalyptus leaves.

But experts in Australia say Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin’s movements and body decorations bear no resemblance to that of the Aborigines’ 60,000 year old culture.

“They have got the whole thing wrong,” said Stephen Page, artistic director of the respected indigenous group, the Bangarra Dance Company.

Page said the two and half minute routine’s didgeridoo music sounded more like it came from India or Africa.

Oh, Harry, Harry. Have you lost another submarine?

Harry Reid, the Democrat Senate Majority Leader and the national government’s highest-ranking Mormon, has admitted now remarking apparently with some amazement on the nation’s highest-ranking black Democrat as being notably “light-skinned” and having “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.”

The stunning quotation, which occurred during the 2008 presidential campaign, was noted/acquired by Mark Halperin of Time and John Heilemann of New York magazine. But for some reason not reported at the time or subsequently.

Instead, it was saved for their upcoming book, “Game Change.” Let’s see how their news magazine bosses are with that decision in coming days.

Although the radioactive quotation was apparently not included in the book’s promotional materials, it appeared on the Atlantic online on an obscure winter Saturday and was picked up in a Washington Post story.

Politicians are criticizing the BBC for inviting debate on whether homosexuals should face execution in Uganda.

The broadcaster launched an on-line debate over a proposed Ugandan law that would punish some homosexual acts by life imprisonment or death.

BBC’s “Africa Have Your Say” Web site asked for people’s views on whether Uganda has gone too far and whether there should be any laws against gays.

But several British politicians said Wednesday that the BBC should not treat the execution of gays as a legitimate topic for discussion.

Europe has long been condemning the communist regime, but none of the countries has gone as far as Poland, where a law was signed allowing people to be fined or imprisoned for keeping and buying communist symbols.

Twenty years after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the Polish government are about to completely erase memories of the Cold War past and make everything from the hammer and sickle and red flag to trendy Che Guevara t-shirts and posters illegal.

On Friday, President Lech Kaczynski approved an amendment to the criminal code which outlaws production, possession, spread and sale of items or recordings containing symbols of communism. Anyone who disobeys the law – for instance, waves a red flag singing The Internationale in the centre of Warsaw – can be fined or even sent to jail for up to two years.

However, communist attributes can still be used for artistic, research and educational purposes. Collectors will not be punished either. The law was put forward by the opposition Law and Justice Party and was passed by the Polish parliament in early November.

“Communism was a genocidal system that led to the murder of tens of millions of people,” Jaroslaw Kaczynski – the president’s twin brother and the head of the party – said back then. “No symbol of communism has a right to exist in Poland, because these are symbols of a genocidal system that should be compared to German Nazism.”

Swiss voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional ban on minarets on Sunday, barring construction of the iconic mosque towers in a surprise vote that put Switzerland at the forefront of a European backlash against a growing Muslim population.

Muslim groups in Switzerland and abroad condemned the vote as biased and anti-Islamic. Business groups said the decision hurt Switzerland’s international standing and could damage relations with Muslim nations and wealthy investors who bank, travel and shop there.

“The Swiss have failed to give a clear signal for diversity, freedom of religion and human rights,” said Omar Al-Rawi, integration representative of the Islamic Denomination in Austria, which said its reaction was “grief and deep disappointment.”

It has been 2 days since I began my countdown to how long it would take Google to FIX their image search result for Michelle Obama.

 Just in case you’ve never done a search I’ll save you the time. This is what you will find…
 
[Please click here to see what's up - karl]

How disturbing is that? What’s even more disturbing is that one of the world’s most powerful search engines, Google, has not officially responded nor have they taken the image down.

A Google employee by the name of Jimmy Deheeger, title unknown, responded to the search result in the Google web search Help Forum…

“I agree that this image is clearly offensive and in very poor taste. Appropriate action will be taken after a speedy review. Thanks for the prompt, detailed reports that brought this issue to my attention!”

The Lowell High School student newspaper published Friday included an advertisement for a white supremacist Web site, reportedly paid for by a group promoting a “campaign to inform, awaken and radicalize our White American youth.”

The site, www.victoryforever.com, features “white resistance music” as well as T-shirts, stickers and links to similar sites.
The ad in The Lowell said “Free Music Downloads” and included the Web site address in a small box below an Arby’s ad inside the paper.

The school distributes the newspaper, the Lowell, once a month to its 2,600 students as well as subscribers through the mail.

The contents of the online site caught school officials by surprise. They pulled all remaining copies of the paper and won’t be mailing out subscription copies, said district spokeswoman Gentle Blythe.

A state trooper has been suspended for 15 days without pay and will be required to attend diversity training after he accidentally sent an e-mail proclaiming white pride to 787 state employees.

The e-mail from Trooper Brent Gobbell states, in part, “You rob us, carjack us, and shoot at us. But, when a white police officer shoots a black gang member … you call him a racist.”

It also includes a list of racist epithets. The message concludes, “There is nothing improper about this e-mail. Let’s see which of you are proud enough to send it on … BE PROUD TO BE WHITE!”

MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer has apologized for mixing up civil rights activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

She made the slip-up Wednesday while introducing Jackson during a segment on homelessness.

After the introduction, Jackson stared at the camera from a studio in Burbank, Calif., and said, “I’m Rev. Jesse Jackson.”

Brewer explained that her script read that she was to introduce “the Rev. Al Sharpton.”

A white US justice of the peace has been criticised for refusing to issue marriage licences to mixed-race couples. Keith Bardwell, of Tangipahoa Parish in Louisiana, denied racism but said mixed-race children were not readily accepted by their parents’ communities.

A couple he refused to marry are considering filing a complaint about him to the US Justice Department. Mr Bardwell said he had often conducted the weddings of his black friends.

Mr Bardwell, who has worked in the role for 34 years, said that in his experience most interracial marriages did not last very long and estimated that he had refused applications to four couples in the past two-and-a-half years.

 He said he had “piles and piles of black friends” but just did not believe in “mixing the races”.

An Australian variety show has become embroiled in an international racism controversy after airing a skit featuring men dressed as the Jackson 5 – with their faces painted black.

The “Jackson Jive” parody, which aired on a reunion episode of the variety show Hey Hey It’s Saturday last night, was deemed offensive by the guest judge, the US singer Harry Connick Jr, who complained on air, saying: “If I knew that was going to be part of the show I definitely wouldn’t have done it.

“On behalf of my country I know it was done humorously, but we’ve spent so much time trying to not make black people look like buffoons that when we see something like that we take it really to heart.”

The show’s host, Darryl Somers, apologised on air to Connick Jr, who lives in New Orleans, for causing offence.

Dr Thilo Sarrazin, a member of the executive board and head of the bank’s risk control operations, told Europe’s culture magazine Lettre International that Turks with low IQs and poor child-rearing practices were “conquering Germany” by breeding two or three times as fast.

“A large number of Arabs and Turks in this city, whose number has grown through bad policies, have no productive function other than as fruit and vegetable vendors,” he said.

“Forty per cent of all births occur in the underclasses. Our educated population is becoming stupider from generation to generation. What’s more, they cultivate an aggressive and atavistic mentality. It’s a scandal that Turkish boys won’t listen to female teachers because that is what their culture tells them”, he said.

“I’d rather have East European Jews with an IQ that is 15pc higher than the German population,” he said

Most world leaders try to avoid repeating gaffes. Not Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian Prime Minister has called President Obama “tanned” again — but this time he did not miss the opportunity to joke about the First Lady’s skin colour as well.

After his return from the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Mr Berlusconi told a rally of conservative supporters that he was bringing greetings from someone in the United States.

“What’s his name? Some tanned guy. Ah, Barack Obama,” he said. He then added: “You won’t believe it, but the two of them sunbathe together, because the wife is also tanned.”

Riot police were struggling to contain protests by anti-fascist demonstrators and rightwing organisations outside a mosque in north-west London tonight.

Officers were hit by bricks and bottles as they tried to keep about 1,000 rival demonstrators apart outside the partially completed mosque near the tube station in Harrow.

Seven people had been arrested and weapons, including bottles of bleach, a hammer and a chisel, were seized, a Metropolitan police spokeswoman said.

Police were braced for trouble after the rightwing English Defence League (EDL) and a group called Stop the Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) said they would converge on the area at 5pm for a rally to mark the eighth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Unite Against Facism called on its supporters to meet for a counter-demonstration.

At around 5pm demonstrators, some armed with weapons, broke through police ranks and ran through the streets.

The stand-off was still going at around 7pm, with groups of youths seperated by riot police.

Someone has ranked 53 incoming Yale freshmen women based on how many beers it would take for guys to find them attractive and sent out an e-mail with what’s called the “The Preseason Scouting Report.”

The e-mail sender was anonymous, but whoever it is, is causing some outrage on the ivy-league campus less than a week into the school year.

The rating system uses words like “sobriety, ” five beers,” or “10 beers,” and women say the feel victimized and university officials are trying to track who sent the e-mail.

Parents are complaining that some paperwork handed out to public school students is in bad form. Students need to select their ethnic background from a list for statistical purposes, and some changes to the wording in the choices are raising eyebrows.

Barbara Holgate is one of the angry parents complaining. “This is a Broward County School book of code and conducts. I have a problem with the ethnic background information that they’re requesting,” she said.

“When it comes to, especially for the black Americans, they’re calling them Haitians or Negroes. I do have a problem with that.”

Victoria Berg wonders why there are so many new words and subcategories. “Why are they singling out Haitians? Why don’t they have the Bahamians? Why don’t they have Cubans? Why don’t they have Martiniqueans? There are so many different Islands ethnicities. They’ve literally just singled out Haitians and Negro, and Negro, to the black community, is not a nice word.”

Software giant Microsoft Corp. is apologizing for altering a photo on its Web site to change the race of one of the people shown in the picture.

A photo on the Seattle-based company’s U.S. Web site shows two men, one Asian and one black, and a white woman seated at a conference room table.

But on the Web site of Microsoft’s Polish business unit, the black man’s head has been replaced with that of a white man. The color of his hand remains unchanged.

The photo editing sparked criticism online. Some bloggers said Poland’s ethnic homogeneity may have played a role in changing the photo.

A poster showing President Barack Obama as Heath Ledger’s “Joker” character from “The Dark Knight” is creating a stir on the streets of Los Angeles where the image began appearing over the weekend.

The Obama-Joker poster shows President Obama with white face paint, dark eye shadow and smudged red lipstick and also has the word “socialism” printed in bold, dark letters under the image of his face.

It’s unclear who created the image and who is posting it across the city. No one has taken credit so far.

Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable President Earl Ofari Hutchinson is calling the depiction, politically mean spirited and dangerous.

A German zoo changed the name of one of its monkeys Friday from! ‘Obama’ to ‘Okeke’ after a black group warned the original name implied a racial slur.

The newborn mandrill was named Obama this March, in honour, zookeepers said, of US President Barack Obama.

 A Dresden Zoo spokesman said the new name took effect Friday and confirmed a report in an English-language website, The Local. Obama visited Dresden last month.

Tahir Della of the Initiative for Black Germans (ISD) was quoted saying, ‘Black people continue to be confronted by associations with the animal kingdom and primitivity.’

More than 60 campers from Northeast Philadelphia were turned away from a private swim club and left to wonder if their race was the reason. Pool Boots Kids Who Might “Change the Complexion”

“I heard this lady, she was like, ‘Uh, what are all these black kids doing here?’ She’s like, ‘I’m scared they might do something to my child,’” said camper Dymire Baylor. The Creative Steps Day Camp paid more than $1900 to The Valley Swim Club.

The Valley Swim Club is a private club that advertises open membership. But the campers’ first visit to the pool suggested otherwise.

“When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool,” Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email.

“The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately.”

A New York congressman says in a YouTube video that Michael Jackson was a “pervert.”

Rep. Peter King said society is “glorifying” a “low-life” while ignoring the efforts of teachers, police officers, firefighters, veterans and volunteers.

Jackson was acquitted of molesting a boy.

In the video, the congressman says the “day in and day out” coverage of Jackson’s death is “too politically correct.” He conceded that Jackson “may have been a good singer” and “did some dancing.”

Bernie Ecclestone, the man who controls Formula One auto racing, said Friday that he preferred totalitarian regimes to democracies and praised Adolf Hitler for his ability to “get things done.”

In an outspoken interview with The Times of London, the 78-year-old British billionaire chastised contemporary politicians for their weaknesses and extolled the virtues of strong leadership. Ecclestone said: “In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was in the way that he could command a lot of people, able to get things done.

“In the end he got lost, so he wasn’t a very good dictator because either he had all these things and knew what was going on and insisted, or he just went along with it … so either way he wasn’t a dictator.”

He also criticized democracy, claiming that “it hasn’t done a lot of good for many countries — including this one [Britain].”

Fireworks called Run Hadji Run were pulled off the shelves of a Wisconsin store after Minnesota Muslims complained that they were racist.

Fireworks called Run Hadji Run were pulled off the shelves of a Wisconsin store after Minnesota Muslims complained that they were racist. The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MN) said that both the name and the packaging are demeaning.

One side of the package has a drawing of Uncle Sam yanking the long beard of a man in traditional Muslim attire, while the other shows a Stealth bomber flying over a group of Arabs riding camels. In addition, “Hadji” is an honorific for those who have completed the pilgrimage to Mecca.

A small-town newspaper is apologizing for running a classified advertisement calling for the assassination of President Barack Obama.

Warren Times Observer Publisher John Elchert says the ad appeared Thursday.

It read, “May Obama follow in the steps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy!”

The four presidents were all assassinated. Elchert tells The Associated Press that the newspaper’s advertising staff didn’t make the historical connection.

Canada’s public broadcaster was wrong to show a skit that joked about the possible assassination of President Barack Obama and suggested he could be a thief, an industry panel ruled on Monday.

The New Year’s Eve “Bye Bye” comedy program — shown by the French-language Radio Canada network — generated more than 200 complaints. In one segment, two hosts discussed Obama’s election in November 2008. Obama, who took office in January, is the first black U.S. president.

“We’re not racists. It will be good to have a Negro in the White House. It will be practical. Black on white, it will be easier to shoot him,” one of the show’s hosts remarked. The Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council said it found “nothing redeeming in the allegedly comedic notion that an American president should be shot, still less that this would be easier to achieve because of the color of the president’s skin. It was a disturbing, wounding, abusive racial comment”.

The show also featured an interview with an actor pretending to be Obama. The host said, “The blacks, you all look alike,” and then warned viewers to hide their purses.

The Boston-area transit authority trolley driver who allegedly slammed into another train while text-messaging his girlfriend Friday was hired as a minority because of his transgendered “female-to-male” status and had three speeding tickets on his driving record in recent years, ABC News has learned.

Aiden Quinn, 24, was born Georgia Quinn and boasts on an Internet networking site that he was one of the first transgender hires by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. The trolley driver lists his sexual orientation as “FTM” and was hired as a minority using his transgender status, two sources told ABC News.

“[Quinn] was initially hired as a minority and used her transgender status,” an MBTA source said today.

Sales of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s autobiography and apologia for his anti-semitism, are soaring in India where business students regard the dictator as a management guru.

 PA Booksellers told The Daily Telegraph that while it is regarded in most countries as a ‘Nazi Bible’, in India it is considered a management guide in the mould of Spencer Johnson’s “Who Moved My Cheese”.

 Sales of the book over the last six months topped 10,000 in New Delhi alone, according to leading stores, who said it appeared to be becoming more popular with every year.

Several said the surge in sales was due to demand from students who see it as a self-improvement and management strategy guide for aspiring business leaders, and who were happy to cite it as an inspiration.

“Students are increasingly coming in asking for it and we’re happy to sell it to them,” said Sohin Lakhani, owner of Mumbai-based Embassy books who reprints Mein Kampf every quarter and shrugs off any moral issues in publishing the book.

When Google Earth added historical maps of Japan to its online collection last year, the search giant didn’t expect a backlash. The finely detailed woodblock prints have been around for centuries, they were already posted on another Web site, and a historical map of Tokyo put up in 2006 hadn’t caused any problems.

But Google failed to judge how its offering would be received, as it has often done in Japan. The company is now facing inquiries from the Justice Ministry and angry accusations of prejudice because its maps detailed the locations of former low-caste communities.

The maps date back to the country’s feudal era, when shoguns ruled and a strict caste system was in place. At the bottom of the hierarchy were a class called the “burakumin,” ethnically identical to other Japanese but forced to live in isolation because they did jobs associated with death, such as working with leather, butchering animals and digging graves.

Castes have long since been abolished, and the old buraku villages have largely faded away or been swallowed by Japan’s sprawling metropolises. Today, rights groups say the descendants of burakumin make up about 3 million of the country’s 127 million people. But they still face prejudice, based almost entirely on where they live or their ancestors lived. Moving is little help, because employers or parents of potential spouses can hire agencies to check for buraku ancestry through Japan’s elaborate family records, which can span back over a hundred years.

Action movie star Jackie Chan questioned the need for freedom for Chinese people during a speech Saturday, prompting outrage from lawmakers in Taiwan and Hong Kong, who accused him of insulting his own race.

The 55-year-old star of “Rush Hour” said at a business forum in the southern Chinese island province Hainan on Saturday that a free society may not be beneficial for authoritarian mainland China.

“I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not,” Chan said at the Boao Forum. “If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic.”

Chan added, “I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.”

- Mexico is protesting what it says is a whopper of an insult. An advertisement for Burger King’s chili-flavored “Texican” burger that has run in Europe shows a small wrestler dressed in a cape resembling a Mexican flag. The wrestler teams up with a lanky American cowboy twice his height to illustrate the cross-border blend of flavors.

“The taste of Texas with a little spicy Mexican,” a narrator’s voice says. The much-taller cowboy boosts the wrestler up to reach high shelves and clean tall windows, while the Mexican helps the cowboy open a jar.

Mexico’s ambassador to Spain said Monday he has written a letter to Burger King’s offices in that nation objecting to the ad and asking that it be removed. Jorge Zermeno told Radio Formula that the ads “improperly use the stereotyped image of a Mexican.”

Asian-Americans say they are outraged that a Texas lawmaker suggested in a hearing that Asian-American voters should adopt names that are “easier for Americans to deal with” at the polls.

Texas Rep. Betty Brown, a Republican, made the comments on Tuesday as Ramey Ko, an associate member of the Organization of Chinese Americans, testified before the Texas House Elections Committee on voter identification legislation.

Ko testified that people of Asian descent frequently have difficulties voting due to differences in their legal transliterated names and the English name shown on their driver’s licenses.

Brown asked Ko: “Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?”

A picture of Adolf Hitler was displayed on a huge billboard in Sofia and immediately prompted the Israeli Embassy to protest to Bulgarian authorities.

The picture of the Nazi leader shown on an advertisement billboard caused outrage in Sofia, the Bulgarian SNA news agency said Tuesday.

Some unsuspecting Facebook users may have fallen prey to a shocking prank.

 A group on the social-networking site calling itself “I Heart Jews” garnered more than 2,000 members — until the group’s name was suddenly changed to “Hitler: Great Modern Man of History,” New York’s WNYW-TV reports.

 ”It’s disgusting. It’s despicable,” said Facebook user Wendy Erdheim, who had been part of the group. “Like, who would ever do that?”

 Other members of the group were similarly shocked.

 ”Is this a joke?” posted one. “Because if it is not I am absolutely appalled.”

 Mark Weitzman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said the name change was no accident.

 ”One would have to say that it’s premeditated and that the intent was there from the beginning,” says Weitzman.

The European Union’s crisis of leadership during this severe economic downturn was thrown into sharp relief on Wednesday, as the prime minister of the country that holds the rotating presidency lambasted President Barack Obama’s emergency stimulus package as “a way to hell” that will “undermine the stability of the global financial market.”

The blunt comments of the Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolanek, coming just a week before a crucial meeting of the Group of 20 that is supposed to show leaders coming together to cope with the crisis, were greeted with embarrassment by many Europeans, who believe that the Czechs do not represent the consensus in the European Union in any case.

What made the situation even more absurd was that Mr. Topolanek lost his parliamentary majority in the Czech Republic on Tuesday, with his new lame-duck status further weakening Prague’s European presidency. Adding to the awkwardness, Mr. Topolanek will host Mr. Obama in Prague a few days after the G-20 meeting, at a United States-European Union summit.

So the old question of who speaks for Europe and when, especially in a crisis, has again become more acute, especially with persistent internal strains between more prosperous West European countries, which use the euro, and newer members in Central and Eastern Europe, which do not.

The mayor of Los Alamitos is coming under fire for an e-mail he sent out that depicts the White House lawn planted with watermelons, under the title “No Easter egg hunt this year.”

 Local businesswoman and city volunteer Keyanus Price, who is black, said Tuesday she received the e-mail from Mayor Dean Grose’s personal account on Sunday and wants a public apology.

“I have had plenty of my share of chicken and watermelon and all those kinds of jokes,” Price told The Associated Press. “I honestly don’t even understand where he was coming from, sending this to me. As a black person receiving something like this from the city-freakin’-mayor—come on.”

Alaska officials are investigating racist jokes about President-elect Barack Obama that have been circulating on state government e-mail accounts.

 One of the five e-mails obtained by the Associated Press asks what was the outcome of the Democrat’s victory after all the time and money spent, and concludes: “Another black family living in government housing!”

 State officials were unaware of the e-mails until asked about them by the AP.

Three of the racist messages were confirmed by the state’s information technology division after an electronic search of the government’s e-mail system, Administration Commissioner Annette Kreitzer said Wednesday.

It’s embarrassing to the state,” she said.

The father of 3-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell, denied a birthday cake with the child’s full name on it by one New Jersey supermarket, is asking for a little tolerance.

Heath Campbell and his wife, Deborah, are upset not only with the decision made by the nearby ShopRite, but also with an outpouring of angry Internet postings in response to a local newspaper article about the cake.

Heath Campbell, who is 35, said in an interview Tuesday that people should look forward, not back, and accept change.

“They need to accept a name. A name’s a name. The kid isn’t going to grow up and do what [Hitler] did,” he said.

A white teacher attempted to enliven a seventh grade discussion of slavery by binding the hands and feet of two black girls, prompting a complaint from one girl’s mother and the local chapter of the NAACP. After the mother complained to the school, the superintendent said he was having “conversations with our staff on how to deliver effective lessons.” “If a student was upset, then it was a bad idea,” said Superintendent Brian Monahan of the North Rockland School District in New York City’s northern suburbs.

A prominent Jewish group said Monday it was reviewing legal options against a German neo-Nazi party for “racist” remarks calling Barack Obama’s election a “declaration of war” on non-white America.

The Berlin chapter of the American Jewish Committee (AFC) condemned statements made by Juergen Gansel, a deputy in the Saxony state legislature for the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany, against Obama’s election as the first African-American US president.

In a statement from his office entitled “Africa conquers the White House,” Gansel said multicultural America sought the destruction of “pure” national cultures and that Obama aimed to destroy the United States’ “white identity.”

“A non-white America is a declaration of war on all people who believe an organically grown social order based on language and culture, history and heritage to be the essence of humanity,” he said.

“Barack Obama hides this declaration of war behind his pushy sunshine smile.”

Gansel said Obama’s triumph was the product of “the American alliance of Jews and Negroes” and warned the president-elect enjoyed too much popularity in Germany.

“Many people in the ‘diverse’ republic Germany have been swept up in Obama fever which resembles an African tropical disease,” he said.

Italy’s famously impolitic Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi described U.S. President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday as “young, handsome and even tanned.”

 Berlusconi appeared to be joking about America’s first black president at a news conference following talks with Russia’s president.

The Italian leader, who has a history of controversial remarks, was asked by a reporter about the prospect for U.S.-Russian relations, which have plummeted to Cold War-levels in recent months.

Berlusconi responded by saying that the relative youth of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, 43, and Obama, 47, should make it easier for Moscow and Washington to work together.

Then he said, smiling: “I told the president that (Obama) has everything needed in order to reach deals with him: he’s young, handsome and even tanned.”

The head of the Japanese air force is to be sacked after saying the country was not an aggressor in World War II, Japan’s defence minister said.

Yasukazu Hamada said Gen Toshio Tamogami’s views, written in an essay, ran counter to the government’s position on the war.

“Therefore it is inappropriate for him to remain in this position and I will swiftly dismiss him,” he said.

The general’s views are likely to anger many of Japan’s neighbours.

China, North and South Korea and other Asian nations still have traumatic memories of Japan’s aggression and colonial rule.

At least four students from a suburban St. Louis middle school face punishment for allegedly hitting Jewish classmates during what they called “Hit a Jew Day.” The incident happened last week at Parkway West Middle School in Chesterfield. District officials said Thursday they believe that fewer than 10 children of the district’s 35 Jewish students were struck. District spokesman Paul Tandy said that in most cases, the students were hit on the back of their shoulders but one student was slapped in the face. It began with an unofficial “Spirit Week” among sixth-graders that started harmlessly enough with a “Hug a Friend Day.” Then there was “High Five Day.” Soon, though, the days moved from friendly to silly. Next there was “Hit a Tall Person Day” and, finally, “Hit a Jew Day.”

A Kansas City man found a racial slur printed on his receipt after returning a pair of shoes he bought over the weekend.

KMBC’s Marcus Moore reported that Keith Slater, 22, bought a pair of shoes from a store called Journeys. Slater later returned them after finding a cheaper pair at another store. Slater did get his money back, but it was what was printed on the receipt that he and his family found disturbing.

“That makes me upset. I don’t want to look at that (receipt,) that makes me so upset. Why would you say that?” said a woman who was shown the receipt.

“Have they been fired? I mean, this is absolutely crazy,” said a man who saw the store ticket.

The receipt, which shows “Cust: Dumb” and then the n-word, is what Slater received after returning a pair of shoes to Journeys at Oak Park Mall.

The Jackson County School Board has taken action against a teacher who apparently made racial commentary on presidential candidate Barack Obama.

According to parents and students in Greg Howard?s seventh-grade social studies class, Howard on Friday, Sept. 26 asked the class a question regarding Obama?s call for change, and proceeded to write out what the letters C-H-A-N-G-E stood for.

 ?She told me that he wrote on the board ?Can You Help A (expletive) Get Elected, and then laughed about it,? said Shelia Christian, a mother of one of Howard?s students.

Jackson County Superintendent Danny Sims said that description of this incident was ?pretty accurate.?

Sims said Howard apparently repeated the action in more than one class, having made the comment in ?a couple of periods.?

A second group of Spanish Olympic athletes has been photographed making “slit-eyed” gestures, threatening to overshadow the Beijing Games with a row over racial stereotyping.

The latest photo to emerge shows Spanish women tennis players pulling the pose, apparently in anticipation of their Federation Cup match against China in April.

Pictures of the Spanish men’s and women’s basketball teams making the gesture, a crude impersonation of Chinese people, were published in adverts in Spanish newspapers earlier this week.

Is the defendant’s dock at the International Criminal Court reserved for leaders of small and poor countries that defy the West? Not if Rwanda has its way. It wants to charge some of France’s most celebrated leaders of the 1990s as collaborators in genocide.

Last week the government of Rwanda issued a damning 500-page report documenting France’s participation in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This marks a remarkable turnaround in the deeply politicized world of human rights reporting. Usually, such reporting takes the form of governments or human rights groups based in the West condemning poor countries for having political or social systems that do not meet Western standards.

Now a wretched African country has turned the table.

All who study the Rwandan genocide, as I did while researching a book about that ill-fated country, come away stunned by what they learn about French support of mass murder. France was so eager to defend a client regime against English-speaking rebels that, as the new report asserts, it gave that regime “political, military, diplomatic and logistic support” and “directly assisted” its genocidal campaign.

The report names 33 present and former French politicians and military officers as conspirators, among them the late President François Mitterrand and other well-known figures like former foreign minister Alan Juppé and former prime minister Dominique de Villepin.

For “reasons of safety”, bars are forbidden to serve “blacks”" and Mongolians or place tables in the street. Street musicians are being banned, and so is buying medicines containing “stimulants” without a prescription. Prohibitions are on the rise for the Olympic capital, while the first leaks reveal a grandiose fireworks display for the inauguration.

Bar owners around the Workers’ Stadium in downtown Beijing say that public security officials are telling them not to let in “blacks” and Mongolians, and many of them have even had to sign a pledge. The official reason is the fight against drugs and prostitution, dominated in the past by Mongolians and persons of colour. Moreover, public places must close by 2 a.m., for security reasons, and the bar owners are being asked to remind their clients that they must always have an identification document with them. There is even doubt over whether the bars within a radius of two kilometres from the Olympic buildings will be able operate, or whether they will have to shut down for the entire period. In some areas, tables are not permitted outside, because “the presence of too many foreigners gathered outside could create problems”. There is also an attempt to shut down outdoor musical concerts, to prevent disorder.

There is a shore town scandal brewing in New Jersey. The mayor of Belmar is stirring up some controversy.

In a newsletter aimed at the town’s summer renters, he referred to a certain group of young people with a name some Italian-Americans find offensive.

Belmar is lovely and tranquil, an escape from humidity and New York City.

Mayor Ken Pringle says he wants to keep it that way, but he may have used the wrong language to make his point. In his weekly newsletter to summer renters, the mayor, borrowing a reference he thought was fairly commonly used in his town, and lifting an incident from “njguido.com,” described a certain type that descends on Belmar:

“Guidos as kind of a rare bird and are “as welcome as, oh, Canada geese.”

No. It will not do. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us, yet again. It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia’s (and Bob Geldof’s) famous Feed The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia’s population has grown from 33.5 million to 78 million today.

So why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country? Where is the logic? There is none. To be sure, there are two things saying that logic doesn’t count.

One is my conscience, and the other is the picture, yet again, of another wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing, yet again, at the camera, which yet again, captures the tragedy of . . .

Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.

Europe’s soccer games have long been the preserve of boisterous fans, drunken brawls and riots. Lately, they have also become the province of anti-Semites and neo-Nazis who comfortably spew hateful epithets in the anonymity of crowded stadiums where they enjoy a troubling measure of support.

In recent years, soccer crowds have gone so far as to simulate the hissing of Nazi gas chambers, pairing the sound with Nazi salutes. In Belgium, Muslim fans at a soccer match between Israel and Belgium shouted “Jews to the gas chambers” and “strangle the Jews,” while waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags. Freed from the restraints of acceptable behavior, with inhibitions loosened by alcohol consumption and the intense camaraderie of team spirit, soccer fans freely unleash anti-Semitic slurs with abandon and without fear of retribution.

This alarming behavior prompts questions as to whether anti-Semitism is becoming acceptable again in a Europe that has forgotten its Nazi past, and whether guilt has been supplanted by denial. Is the era of Nazism being re-examined and re-framed in a more positive light that contributes to such gratuitous and ugly outbursts?

A Japanese mobile phone firm said today it had pulled a TV advert depicting a monkey as a political candidate amid accusations that it was a racist reference to Barack Obama, who is seeking to become the first black US president.

The ad, for eMobile, shows a monkey in a suit addressing an election rally, surrounded by supporters carrying placards carrying the word “Change”.

The apparent intention is to persuade subscribers to other mobile phone carriers to transfer to eMobile.

But the combination of the monkey, and the resemblance of his message to the theme of Obama’s campaign, “Change we can believe in”, prompted bloggers to accuse the company of making a racist slur against the Democratic hopeful.

Massachusetts politician and defense attorney Rep. James Fagan is under intense public scrutiny after he promised to “rip apart” child victims of rape who testify if the state imposes strict sentences for sex offenders.

Fagan, a Democrat, made his controversial remarks on the state House floor, Fox News reported.

“I’m gonna rip them apart,” Fagan said of child victims. “I’m going to make sure that the rest of their life is ruined, that when they’re 8 years old, they throw up; when they’re 12 years old, they won’t sleep; when they’re 19 years old, they’ll have nightmares and they’ll never have a relationship with anybody.”

As a defense attorney, Fagan said he would prevent accused child sex offenders from experiencing a “mandatory sentence of those draconian proportions.”

An Italian man was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping his ex-girlfriend from a pub, taking her home and forcing her to iron his clothes and wash the dishes, police said Monday.

The 43-year-old man dragged the woman out of a pub in the port city of Genoa, shoved her into a car and took her to his home, where he made her iron and wash dishes after threatening her, they said.

A Labour MP wants a Conservative politician to end his plans to stand in the next general election after a row over a comment about Italians.

Caerphilly MP Wayne David said it was the “sensible and logical thing” for Alun Cairns to step down as candidate for the Vale of Glamorgan seat.

Mr Cairns quit his assembly education spokesman post and apologised for his “inappropriate” comments.

He likened Italians to “greasy wops” in a radio discussion on Euro 2008.

The motto of the 2006 Soccer World Cup in Germany was “The world is our guest, you’re staying with friends” [Die Welt zu Gast bei Freunden] — or, in the simplified official translation, “A time to make friends.” Two years later, however, the prospects of a good showing by the German national team in the European soccer championships, currently being co-hosted by Austria and Switzerland, appear to be inspiring anything but friendly sentiments among some German soccer fans.

As first reported by the Austrian news agency APA [link in German], around 140 “mostly German” fans were arrested Sunday night in Klagenfurt in the run-up to the German team’s opening match against Poland. The rowdy German fans were chanting what the APA describes as “obviously racist and anti-Semitic slogans” that “recall the Nazi period.” More precisely and more bizarrely, they were in fact adapting anti-Semitic motifs from the Third Reich in order to insult their Polish rivals: chanting “All Poles have to wear yellow stars” and “Germans defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Poles!” The latter is a variation on the slogan with which the Nazis unrolled their infamous boycott of Jewish shops and businesses in 1933: “Germans defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!”

Apparently the Obamas of Kenya have been reading those scurrilous emails to which Barack likes to refer, because they have no doubt — contrary to the claims of the Obama campaign, that the presidential candidate was raised a Moslem. They take that as a given.

As the Jerusalem Post reports, “Barack Obama’s half brother Malik said Thursday that if elected his brother will be a good president for the Jewish people, despite his Muslim background. In an interview with Army Radio he expressed a special salutation from the Obamas of Kenya.”

The Obama brothers’ father, a senior economist for the Kenyan government who studied at Harvard University, died in car crash in 1982. He left six sons and a daughter. All of his children – except Malik — live in Britain or the United States. Malik and Barack met in 1985.

In a remarkable denial issued last November that still stands on the official campaign website, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs issued a statement explaining that “Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised as a Muslim, and is a committed Christian.”

Apparently Malik Obama, himself a Muslim, had not read the press release.

A toy being sold over the internet by a Utah couple is causing an uproar from supporters of democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. It’s a sock monkey wearing a suit with a lapel pin for Obama.

Supporters of Obama have been filling online forums and blogs with angry words over what they see as the degrading depiction of a black man as a monkey.

Such portrayals are a throw back to the days of “Jim Crow” laws in southern states. The depictions were designed to make one man appear inferior, less than human, for no other reason than the color of his skin. From different blogs, one writer puts it simply: “The ‘Sock Obama’ is disgusting.” Others say its makers are racists.

Irish Justice Minister Dermot Ahern says substantial vote tallies across the country show the European Union Lisbon reform treaty has been rejected.

Tallies are not official, but Mr Ahern says it is clear the No vote is ahead in a vast majority of constituencies.

This would scupper the treaty, which must be ratified by all members. Only Ireland has held a public vote on it.

Mr Ahern is the first senior figure from the Irish government to admit that it looked like the treaty had failed.

“It looks like this will be a No vote,” Mr Ahern said on live television. “At the end of the day, for a myriad of reasons, the people have spoken.”

Barack Obama’s vice presidential vetting team will undoubtedly run across some quirky and potentially troublesome issues as it goes about the business of scouring the backgrounds of possible running mates. But it’s unlikely they’ll find one so curious as Virginia Democratic Sen. Jim Webb’s affinity for the cause of the Confederacy.

Webb is no mere student of the Civil War era. He’s an author, too, and he’s left a trail of writings and statements about one of the rawest and most sensitive topics in American history.

He has suggested many times that while the Confederacy is a symbol to many of the racist legacy of slavery and segregation, for others it simply reflects Southern pride. In a June 1990 speech in front of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, posted on his personal website, he lauded the rebels’ “gallantry,” which he said “is still misunderstood by most Americans.”

Webb, a descendant of Confederate officers, also voiced sympathy for the notion of state sovereignty as it was understood in the early 1860s, and seemed to suggest that states were justified in trying to secede.

The president of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation is disturbed by an offensive t-shirt the group received in the mail Wednesday, the day after Barack Obama claimed his party’s presidential nomination. The shirt has a cartoon image of Curious George, the beloved children’s character, with a paper bag over his head holding a sign that says “A Truth We Can Believe in ‘08!!!” written underneath.

CBCF President Elsie Scott says she believes the timing of the package was no coincidence. “We received it as a reaction to Obama winning the nomination,” she tells the Sleuth.

The t-shirt was made by a company called Spring River Tees, which also on its Web site sells “Obama in ‘08″ t-shirts that depict Curious George. The “truth-we-can-believe-in” t-shirt that the CBCF received is also sold on the web site, titled “Hussein,” which is Obama’s middle name.

The mother of a former Jones High School student whose picture appeared above the yearbook category “Most Likely to End Up on Cops” is ticked off that the school allowed the label to make it to print.

“My reaction was, I couldn’t believe they would allow such a topic to appear in a yearbook,” said Carolyn Green, whose son, Marquise Laroach, appeared in the photo. His name, spelled ‘Marquis’ in the yearbook, appeared alongside that of another senior, who was identified as “Jasmine Franklen.”

“Jones High is a predominantly black school trying to improve its image,” Green said. “How does this achieve that? It defeats the purpose.”

A top Iranian cleric from the northeast, Ayatollah Ahmad Elmalhoda, has reportedly called feminists “whores and foreign spies”.

“These whores, clutching a piece of paper in their hands to gather signatures, are working for foreign powers and want to destabilise the Islamic Republic,” said Elmalhoda.

He is the highly influential prayer leader in the northeastern holy Shia city of Mashad.

Elmalhoda has called on the government to “intervene decisively against these whores, because it is improper to leave them to act with impunity.”

A few weeks ago, Elmalhoda said women who do not wear the Islamic veil as instructed “turned men into animals.”

A former SS doctor accused of sending 900 sick children to their deaths under the Nazi euthanasia programme has been awarded a German medical association’s highest honour.

The decision comes as Jewish organisations continue to press Germany to put 92-year-old Hans-Joachim Sewering on trial for mass murder.

He was given the Guenther-Budelmann medal by the German Federation of Internal Medicine for “unequalled services in the cause of freedom of the practice and the independence of the medical profession and to the nation’s health system”.

Sewering was a doctor at a tuberculosis clinic near Munich before World War II.

He allegedly signed orders sending 900 German Catholic children from the clinic to a “healing centre”.

In fact, it was a killing centre carrying out a secret Nazi policy of murdering the handicapped who were declared “useless eaters” by the Nazis before the war.

Throw a rock into a congregation of collies, retrievers, poodles, spaniels and assorted other aristocrats and you can be sure the dog yelping in unexpected pain is the one you hit.

President Bush, marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel, reminded the Knesset yesterday that the appeasement of evil is the route to catastrophe.

“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” he said. “We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

A routine fire drill at Hightstown High School in Mercer County turned terrifying for one student.

As students gathered outside on school grounds one morning last week, someone came up behind a 16-year-old junior, a member of the Sikh faith, and allegedly set the boy’s turban on fire.

His hair was singed in several places, but he was otherwise unhurt, according to his uncle, Harjot Pannu.

“He felt like a bee stung him, and he patted on it,” said Pannu. “Next thing he knew, a teacher came over and told him he was on fire.”

An 18-year-old Hightstown senior, Garrett Green, was arrested hours later and charged with arson and criminal mischief, said Ben Miller, an investigator with the Hightstown Police Department.

Marietta tavern owner Mike Norman says the T-shirts he’s peddling, featuring cartoon chimp Curious George peeling a banana, with “Obama in ‘08″ scrolled underneath, are “cute.” But to a coalition of critics, the shirts are an insulting exploitation of racial stereotypes from generations past.

“It’s time to put an end to this,” said Rich Pellegrino, a Mableton resident and director of the Cobb-Cherokee Immigrant Alliance. It was among the organizations planning to gather outside Mulligan’s Bar and Grill Tuesday afternoon to protest the “racist and highly offensive” shirts.

“There’s no place for these views, not in this day and age,” he said.

Just down the street from Marietta’s famous Big Chicken, Mulligan’s has carved a provocative niche in an increasingly multicultural area, thanks to its owner’s ultra-conservative political views. If you live in Marietta, it’s impossible not to know what’s on Norman’s mind, as he posts his views on signs in front of Mulligan’s.

Among his recent musings: “I wish Hillary had married OJ,” “No habla espanol — and never will” and the standard “I.N.S. Agents eat free.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters — including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

A state senator told a black pastor testifying at a committee hearing that, given the chance to cast secret ballots, his fellow legislators would vote to legalize slavery.

Sen. Vincent J. Fumo, D-Philadelphia, made the comments Tuesday during a hearing on a Republican-sponsored bill to amend the state Constitution to outlaw same-sex marriages and civil unions, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on its Web site Wednesday.

“What you are advocating here is that we take away the rights of a minority. And I don’t think that’s right,” Fumo, a staunch defender of gay rights, told the witness, Gilbert Coleman Jr., senior pastor of Freedom Christian Bible Fellowship in Philadelphia.

He added, “If we introduced a bill on slavery, it might pass. That doesn’t make it right.”

Coleman, who was testifying in favor of the measure, responded: “I doubt that sir.”
“Oh, don’t bet on it in this General Assembly,” Fumo countered. “I know some people up here, especially on a secret ballot, it would be almost unanimous.”

An action-man style doll of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler has gone on sale in the Ukraine, with saleswomen comparing the doll to Barbie.

Supermarkets in the capital Kiev are stocking the 40 centimetre high figure of the fuhrer, complete with jackboots, leather trench-coat and swastika armband.

The £100 figure has a spare head “with a kind expression on it,” glasses and several changes of clothes.

It comes in a presentation box with the dates of Hitler’s birth and death on it.
…
One saleswoman said: “It is like Barbie. Kids can undress fuhrer, pin on medals and there’s a spare head in the kit to give him a kinder expression on his face.

“He has glasses that are round, in the manner of pacifist Jon Lennon”.

North Dakota State University is investigating complaints about a campus skit in which a white student in blackface portrayed Barack Obama receiving a lap dance.

The same skit, part of a charity fundraiser held at a campus theater, also featured a depiction of cowboys having sex with each other, witnesses told The Forum newspaper, which first reported the backlash Friday.

“We’re trying to find out the right approaches for accountability, but at the same time try to heal wounds that have occurred and allow the campus to move ahead,” Janna Stoskopf, NDSU’s dean of students, told The Associated Press on Friday.

The March 18 skit involving the NDSU Saddle and Sirloin Club was performed at the Mr. NDSU Pageant, which is sponsored by the Alpha Gamma Delta sorority and raises money for diabetes research.

People who attended it said a pageant contestant from Saddle and Sirloin dressed as a woman from the Internet video “I Got a Crush on Obama” and performed a strip tease for another student, who was wearing dark makeup and an afro wig.

Max Mosley, one of the most powerful men in world sport, was under pressure to resign as boss of Formula One’s governing body last night after he was exposed enjoying a Nazi-style orgy with five prostitutes.

Jewish groups condemned the behaviour of Mosley, 67, whose father, Sir Oswald, was the leader of the British Union of Fascists and a friend of Adolf Hitler.

Mr Mosley was caught on video by the News of the World with five women in an underground “torture chamber” in Chelsea, where he spent several hours allegedly indulging in sado-masochistic sex.

The Oxford-educated former barrister, who is president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), reenacted a concentration camp scene in which he played the role of both guard and inmate.

Speaking in German and brandishing a leather whip, he beat the women after allowing himself to be subjected to a humiliating inspection for lice and an interrogation in chains.

A YouTube audio clip of a state lawmaker’s screed against homosexuality, which she called a bigger threat than terrorism, has outraged gay activists and brought death threats rolling in.

“The homosexual agenda is destroying this nation, OK, it’s just a fact,” Rep. Sally Kern said recently to a gathering of fellow Republicans outside the Capitol.

“Studies show no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted, you know, more than a few decades. So it’s the death knell in this country.

“I honestly think it’s the biggest threat that our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, which I think is a big threat,” she said.

A high-profile supporter quit Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign on Wednesday after a remark about black Democratic rival Barack Obama was interpreted as racist.

Geraldine Ferraro, the only woman to run on a major U.S. party’s White House ticket, had said Obama was leading Clinton in the race for the Democratic party nomination for November’s presidential election because he was black.

Ferraro, the trailblazing 1984 Democratic vice presidential candidate, was a member of Clinton’s finance committee and raised funds for the New York senator and former first lady before stepping down, a campaign spokesman said.

A black civil rights activist is fighting to close a store that sells KKK robes and T-shirts emblazoned with racial slurs. David Kennedy is confident he can make it happen. After all, he says he owns the building.

Since 1996, the Redneck Shop has operated in an old movie theater that, according to court records, was transferred in 1997 to Kennedy and the Baptist church he leads.

“Our ownership puts an end to that history as far as violence and hatred, racism being practiced in that place and also the recruiting of the Klan,” Kennedy said. “This is the same place that we had to go up into the balcony to go to the movies before the Klan took it. So there’s a lot of history there.”

But legal documents also indicate that the man who runs the store, 62-year-old John Howard, is entitled to operate his business in the building until he dies. Now the dispute may go to court.

Deceit, thy name is woman.

Most females lie “more cleverly and successfully than men” about everything from infidelity and facelifts to barhopping and shopping binges, according to a new book.

“Women lie as a survival technique, but also to get what they want,” said Susan Shapiro Barash, author of “Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie,” published by St. Martin’s Press this week.

Barish said a Rockland County woman stripped of her secrets on Fox TV’s reality show “Moment of Truth” last week proves her research true.

White students at a South African university tricked black residence hall workers into eating stew containing urine, prompting a march Wednesday in which five people were arrested, university officials said.
The white students made a video of the incident, which they staged in reaction to the university’s efforts to integrate its residences, according to a statement from the University of the Free State.

The protesters on Wednesday included black and white students who later marched to the residence where the video was made and demanded that it be shut down, witnesses said.

AN Israeli politician has blamed a spate of recent earthquakes in the Middle East on gays
Shlomo Benizri of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party said the only way to prevent the earthquakes was for parliament to stop liberalising laws concerning homosexuals, AP reported.

“Why do earthquakes happen? One of the reasons is the things to which the Knesset (parliament) gives legitimacy, to sodomy,” Mr Benizri said.

Mr Benizri said earthquake damage could be avoided if the parliament stopped “passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes”.

An editorial penned this week by a University of Colorado student has divided some past and present members of the Campus Press — the official student newspaper at CU — and enraged other students for what some said is a racist and inflammatory commentary about people of Asian ethnicity.

The column, titled “If it’s war the Asians want … It’s war they’ll get,” was written by Max Karson, a staff editor at the Campus Press.

Administrators in November 2006 investigated Karson because of a satirical newsletter he circulated called “The Yeti,” which angered some students and faculty members for writings that included columns about how women are not designed to enjoy sex and that he is “afraid of black people.”
…
“The Asian was so jaded by his experiences with the whitebread, brainless tree sloths of CU that even though three people had explained to him that he was trying to return the ball to the wrong court, it was inconceivable to him that we might be right,” Karson wrote. “And when he looked into my eyes, it wasn’t just irritation and disgust that I saw — it was hate. Pure hate.

“They hate us all. And I say it’s time we started hating them back.”

If you thought race was an uncomfortable issue in the Democratic presidential primary, wait ’til you get a load of what’s going on in the Democratic primary in the Memphis area’s 9th District of Tennessee, where a shockingly worded flier paints Jewish Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) as a Jesus hater.

“Memphis Congressman Steve Cohen and the JEWS HATE Jesus,” blares the flier, which Cohen himself received in the mail — inducing gasps — last week.

Circulated by an African-American minister from Murfreesboro Tenn., which isn’t even in Cohen’s district, the literature encourages other black leaders in Memphis to “see to it that one and ONLY one black Christian faces this opponent of Christ and Christianity in the 2008 election.”

A government minister has warned that inbreeding among immigrants is causing a surge in birth defects – comments likely to spark a new row over the place of Muslims in British society.

Phil Woolas, an environment minister, said the culture of arranged marriages between first cousins was the “elephant in the room”. Woolas, a former race relations minister, said: “If you have a child with your cousin the likelihood is there’ll be a genetic problem.”

The minister, whose views were supported by medical experts this weekend, said: “The issue we need to debate is first cousin marriages, whereby a lot of arranged marriages are with first cousins, and that produces lots of genetic problems in terms of disability [in children].”

The Archbishop of Canterbury was facing demands to quit last night as the row over sharia law intensified.

Leading bishops publicly contradicted Dr Rowan Williams’s call for Islamic law to be brought into the British legal system.

With the Church of England plunged into crisis, senior figures were said to be discussing the archbishop’s future.

One member of the church’s “Cabinet”, the Archbishop’s Council, was reported as saying: “There have been a lot of calls for him to resign. I don’t suppose he will take any notice, but, yes, he should resign.”

Singer Kumi Koda has apologized after saying women over 35 had “rotten” fluid in their wombs, sparking a furor that led a cosmetics maker to suspend advertisements featuring her. “I sincerely and deeply apologize for offending people with my remark,” Koda, a 25-year-old pop idol famed for her cute and sexy look, said on her official website. Her agency, Avex Entertainment, said it was taking the matter seriously and announced a halt to promotional activities for her latest album, “Kingdom,” which was released at the end of January.

Speaking on a popular radio program, Koda said that her newlywed manager should have children soon for the sake of the mother’s amnion, the part of the womb that protects an embryo.

“Mothers’ amnion fluid is rotten once they turn around 35,” she said. “I mean it. It gets dirty.” The soundbite was reproduced on Internet sites along with furious postings.

THE Holocaust Memorial Day marking the genocides of the 20th century was marred on Sunday when a gang of youths stoned Jewish tourists on a guided tour of London’s East End.

A group of 96 visitors looking at sites of Jewish interest were attacked by youths hiding behind a fence in a back street in Whitechapel.

Two were struck by the missiles, an American woman just starting a new post at London’s Metropolitan University and a Canadian lecturer.

The woman had blood pouring from her head and needed hospital treatment.

A Texas prosecutor who was accused of using the word “Canadian” as a racial slur in an e-mail could be part of the focus of an ongoing probe into the actions of another district attorney.

The e-mail, sent out in 2003 by Harris County assistant district attorney Mike Trent, has recently come to light as part of an investigation of Harris County Texas District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal, who is accused of sending racist and sexist e-mails.

In 2003, Trent sent a staff-wide e-mail congratulating his colleague Robert Freyer for winning a conviction.

In the e-mail, Trent wrote: “He overcame a subversively good defense by Matt Hennessey that had some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant and forced them to do the right thing.”

A Carnival float with a pile of model dead bodies commemorating the Holocaust is causing unease before the lavish parades in Rio de Janeiro this weekend.

The Viradouro samba organization, or school, plans to feature the grim display when it marches in the Sambadrome parade strip on Sunday, despite objections from a local Jewish group.

“Really, it makes no sense addressing this theme with drums and dancing girls,” said Sergio Niskier, president of the Israelite Federation in Rio de Janeiro state, referring to the slaughter of Jews by Nazi Germany in World War Two.

AS a man to spend the night with, Adolf Hitler must rank pretty close to the bottom of the list.

But that hasn’t deterred a new Belgrade hotel, which features a room dedicated to the Nazi dictator. A large portrait of a swastika-wearing Hitler looms over the king-size bed.

Each of the rooms at Mr President – Serbia’s first “designer” hotel – features a current or former world leader.

The editor of Golfweek magazine said he was overwhelmed by negative reaction to the photo of a noose on the cover of this week’s issue, illustrating a story about the suspension of a Golf Channel anchor for using the word “lynch” in an on-air discussion about how to beat Tiger Woods.

“We knew that image would grab attention, but I didn’t anticipate the enormity of it,” Dave Seanor, vice president and editor of the weekly magazine, said from the PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, Fla.

“There’s been a huge, negative reaction,” he said. “I’ve gotten so many e-mails. It’s a little overwhelming.”

Among the critics was PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem, who said he found the imagery to be “outrageous and irresponsible.”

A candidate campaigning for the Graz city council in Austria says it is time that Islam was “thrown back … behind the Mediterranean,” and alleges Muhammad wrote the Koran in “epileptic fits.”

…

Susanne Winter, a right-wing politician with the FPÖ party running for a city council seat in the city of Graz, blasted Muslims on Sunday, saying that “in today’s system” the Prophet Muhammad would be considered a “child molester,” apparently referring to his marriage to a six-year-old child. She also said that it is time for Islam to be “thrown back where it came from, behind the Mediterranean.” Not yet finished, she also claimed that Muhammad wrote the Koran in “epileptic fits.”

Ach, du Schweinhund – a dog trained to give the Nazi salute has landed his owner in jail.

Adolf the part-Alsatian mongrel raises his right paw whenever he hears the command “Heil Hitler”.

Now his owner, a pensioner named as Roland T, has been jailed in Germany, a country where all Nazi symbols or salutes are now strictly verboten.

The owner had previously been in trouble for shaving illegal Nazi insignia into the dog’s fur.

Will Smith has stunned the world by declaring that even Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was essentially a “good” person.

The Men In Black star, 39, is determined to see the best in people, and is convinced the former German leader did not fully understand the extent of the pain and suffering his actions would cause during his time in power in the 1930s and ’40s.

Races have evolved away from each other over the past 10,000 years, according to new research that challenges standard ideas about the biological significance of ethnicity.

A genetic analysis of human evolution has shown that rather than slowing to a standstill it has speeded up, with different pressures on different populations pushing racial groups further apart. Scientists behind the findings suggest that European, African and Asian populations grew genetically more distinct from each other over several thousand years, as their environments took them down different evolutionary paths.

This would call into question the popular scientific view that race has little or no biological meaning, as the genetic similarities between ethnic groups greatly outweigh differences.

It started with a picture on Facebook and has now created a firestorm of outrage.

Two Penn State students, dressed as Virginia Tech shooting victims, at a Halloween party have enraged people from the Virginia Tech community, as well as the entire country.

10 On Your Side has seen all of the controversial pictures. They are of two Penn State students and are extremely graphic. Both are wearing Virginia Tech t-shirts and elaborate make-up. Both have bullet holes in their bodies.

A local politician has shocked Italians, and Jews in particular, by proposing that immigrants be treated with the same severity the Nazis used when they occupied the country.

Giorgio Bettio, a city councilor in the northern city of Treviso, said during a council meeting earlier this week: “With immigrants, we should use the same system the SS used, punish 10 of them for every slight against one of our citizens.”

His comments revived memories of the 1944 Ardeatine Caves massacre, when Hitler ordered that 10 Italians be executed for each of the 33 German soldiers killed in a partisan attack against occupying forces on a Rome street.

From her baptism in Liberia to Christmas years later in her adopted New York City, Mamie Manneh never lost the longing to celebrate religious rituals by eating monkey meat.

Now, the tribal customs of Manneh and other West African immigrants have become the focus of an unusual criminal case over alleged illegal meat smuggling, and touching on issues of religious freedom, infectious diseases and wildlife preservation.

The case “appears to be the first of its kind relating to that uniquely African product,” defense attorney Jan Rostal wrote in a pending motion to dismiss. “Unfortunately, it represents the sort of clash of cultural and religious values inherent in the melting pot that is America.”

Students at Cocoa Beach Jr./Sr. High School are waging a war on peace.

Recently, sophomore Skylar Stains decided to hold Peace Shirt Thursdays at the school. Skylar and her friend, Lauren Lorraine, started wearing peace shirts and soon recruited more friends to wear them. Now, the “Peace Shirt Coalition” as they call themselves, has close to 30 students from all grades.

“We’ve worn handmade peace shirts every Thursday since the first week of school, without fail,” Skylar said.

But what started out as a light-hearted gesture soon started to be taken out of context.

Students started approaching the group members, yelling obscene things at them, said Lauren.

“People just turned on us like that,” she said. “At least 10 boys stood up and yelled things at me at once, and we couldn’t even walk through the halls without a harsh comment being made.”

The Hoboken, N.J., police SWAT team — which is taking heat for racy pictures showing its members frolicking with Hooters waitresses — is no more. Hoboken’s newly named public safety director disbanded the SWAT team shortly after being sworn in on Friday, authorities confirmed.

“The unit itself has been disbanded permanently,” Public Safety Director Bill Bergin told the Jersey Journal. He is a former deputy chief with the Hoboken Fire Department.

A white state lawmaker in a runoff election called a black civil-rights veteran who had helped her campaign “Buckwheat,” prompting the NAACP to urge voters to kick her out of office.

Rep. Carla Blanchard Dartez, a Democrat, acknowledged that she ended a Thursday night conversation with Hazel Boykin by saying, “Talk to you later, Buckwheat.” Dartez had been thanking Boykin for driving voters to the polls.

Buckwheat, a black child character in the “Little Rascals” comedies of the 1930s and ’40s, is viewed as a racial stereotype.

Homosexuals deserve to be executed or tortured and possibly both, an Iranian leader told British MPs during a private meeting at a peace conference, The Times has learnt.

Mohsen Yahyavi is the highest-ranked politician to admit that Iran believes in the death penalty for homosexuality after a spate of reports that gay youths were being hanged.

President Ahmadinejad, questioned by students in New York two months ago about the executions, dodged the issue by suggesting that there were no gays in his country.

Clashes have broken out in Prague between neo-Nazis and protesters trying to block their right-wing march.

More than 1,000 people rallied in the Czech capital’s old Jewish quarter to try to stop the march by members of the Young Nationalist Democrats (MND).

The march was planned for the anniversary of the 1938 anti-Jewish purge known as Kristallnacht.

Stray dogs wander forlornly around the rundown gray brick barracks that used to house of one of the most notorious World War II Nazi death camps in the Balkans.

Soon, the site where some 48,000 Jews, Serbs and Gypsies perished in the 1940s will be throbbing to the rhythms of rock music.

For Serbia’s small Jewish community, the weekend concert at the Sajmiste camp near the center of Belgrade is the latest indignity to befall a site they say needs to be saved from decades of neglect and deterioration.

“It’s like holding a wedding at a graveyard,” said Aleksandar Mosic, a Jewish chairman of the camp’s memorial center, ahead of Saturday’s concert by British band Kosheen.

The BBC apologised Wednesday after a top national radio presenter triggered protests by saying she could not see black people in the dark.

Radio 2 DJ Sarah Kennedy made the comment when, during a discussion about winter road conditions on her morning show, she explained how she had almost run over a pedestrian.

“You know what happened to me yesterday? It was this black guy. It’s lucky he opened his mouth to yawn or do something and I saw him. He was wearing a black hat, black clothes and he was just invisible,” she said.

One of the world’s most eminent scientists is at the centre of a row after claiming black people are less intelligent than whites.

James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, has drawn condemnation for comments made ahead of his arrival in Britain tomorrow for a speaking tour.

Dr Watson, who now runs one of America’s leading scientific research institutions, made the controversial remarks in an interview in The Sunday Times.

The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”.

An Italian monsignor was suspended from his position at the Holy See after the cleric said in a television interview he “didn’t feel he was sinning” by having sex with gay men, the Vatican and news reports said Saturday.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi told journalists that while the case was under investigation the monsignor was suspended from his job as a top official in the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy, an office which aims to ensure proper conduct by priests.

A local DJ and party promoter retreated Thursday from a plan to sponsor a bash that would let “light-skinned” black women into a downtown club for free.

But the “Light Skin Libra Birthday Bash” at Club APT on Woodward Avenue turned out to be a bashing — of promoter Ulysses “DJ Lish” Barnes after word of the unusual party spread on the Internet.

A prosecutor in Bolzano, northern Italy seized wine bottle labels on Wednesday bearing a portrait of Hitler and other Nazis from a winery near the Austrian border, the company said.

The 20 labels from the “Der Fuehrer” line show Hitler raising the Nazi salute and his generals, including Hermann Goering, the Reich’s economic minister, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Gestapo, and Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy.

The black and white labels are imprinted with the mottoes “Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer” (one people, one empire, one Fuehrer) and “Sieg heil”, a slogan proclaimed by Hitler as a greeting or in front of the masses.

The incriminating labels constitute a glorification of the perpetrators of crimes against humanity, according to state prosecutor Cuno Tarfusser.

The German television network NDR has sacked a prominent talk show host after she praised the family model promoted by the Nazis.

NDR said Eva Herman, 48, was fired after confirming quotes printed by the newspaper Bild am Sonntag.

She said “values like the family, children and motherhood, which were promoted in the Third Reich too, were later scrapped by the 68ers”.

It seems almost unthinkable in the homeland created by the Jews after the terrors of fascism.

But Israel has a cell of neo-Nazis, accused of a string of attacks on foreign workers, orthodox Jews, drug addicts and gays.

The immigrants from the former Soviet Union are all Israeli citizens and have been arrested in connection with 15 assaults.

The anti-semitic group attacked at least 15 jews

News of the arrests has shocked Israel, which was founded nearly 60 years ago in the wake of the Holocaust.

The discovery of anti-Semitism within its own borders has dominated Israeli newspapers and TV and radio news shows.

“On Tuesday in a Spanish-language class at Holy Family High School, a single handful of students used heated and inappropriate rhetoric in a discussion on immigration. In a class of approximately 30 students, fewer than six students voiced strong anti-immigration opinions. The remaining two-thirds of the class were silent or voiced support for immigrants. At the end of the discussion, one student inappropriately said “white power,” two or three times. Most of the students in the class did not hear the comments. Contrary to media reports, there were no chants by more than one student. Two students, who were offended, asked to leave the classroom and were given permission to leave. However, the discussion ended when other students realized how these students were affected and all of the students remained until the end of class.”

A crudely made “Ghetto Handbook” distributed by a Houston school district police officer sparked angry words Thursday from leaders in the district and the community — both because of its language and the fact that no action was taken for three months.

“This publication was completely reprehensible and HISD condemns it in the strongest possible terms,” Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra said in a written statement.

But some also questioned why it took so long for district officials to learn about the booklet and begin investigating.

The officer who first handed it out in May was suspended with pay this week, pending results of an investigation by the Houston Independent School District. Officials refused to identify him but said he was ordered to go to diversity training.

The eight-page handout, which includes a few grainy photographs, purports to offer definitions that will enable the reader to speak Ebonics “as if you just came out of the hood.” Ebonics is a nonstandard variety of English spoken by some black Americans.

The definitions include such terms as “foty: a 40-ounce bottle of beer”; “aks: to ask a question”; and “hoodrat: scummy girl.”

The booklet — subtitled “Wucha dun did now?” — names six HISD officers “and the entire day shift patrol” as contributors. District spokesman Terry Abbott said, however, that a preliminary investigation has cleared those officers of involvement.

This is an actual ad-campaign by UNICEF Germany!

This campaign is “blackfacing” white children with mud to pose as “uneducated africans”.

The headline translates “This Ad-campaign developped pro bono by the agency Jung von Matt/Alster shows four german kids who appeal for solidarity with their contemporaries in Afrika”

Intel, the computer chip maker, has been forced to apologise for an advertisement which has been widely criticised as racist.

The ad, which was for a new generation of micro-processors, showed six black sprinters crouched in the start position in front a white man wearing a shirt and chinos in an office.

Above the image was a slogan which read: “Multiply computer performance and maximise the power of your employees.”

Feminist Germaine Greer has caused outrage in Australia for calling the late Princess of Wales, “slow”, “devious” and “disturbingly neurotic”.

The controversial academic claims Diana is partly responsible for the car accident that killed her almost a decade ago – by initiating a love triangle between herself, Dodi Fayed and heart surgeon Hasnat Khan.

“The saddest thought of all is that Diana’s death may have resulted indirectly from another of her hack-handed manipulations; it is said that she only went to Paris with (her late lover) Dodi Fayed in order to make heart surgeon Hasnat Khan jealous,” writes Greer in an essay published in Weekend Australian Magazine.

A poster advertising a cult UFO conference in Glastonbury was taken down after concerns that a swastika featured on it was causing offence.

The symbol is part of the logo for the Raelian movement which believes that humans are descendents of aliens.

The granddaughter of wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo said Tuesday if she wins election later this month for a seat in the Diet she will push to strengthen the military, rewrite the history of the Rape of Nanking and move to censure the United States for dropping atomic bombs on Japan.

Yuko Tojo is seeking a seat in the Upper House of the Diet. She is running as an independent after being rejected by the ruling conservative party.

Tojo told a news conference one of her primary goals in office would be to settle issues from World War II that remain deeply controversial.

On Japan’s mobilization of tens to hundreds of thousands of “comfort women” to serve in front-line brothels, Tojo said the government was not directly involved, a commonly held belief among Japanese conservatives despite evidence to the contrary.

Blair launches stinging attack on ‘absurd’ British Islamists

…’The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don’t have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you’ve got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries,’ Blair told Observer columnist Will Hutton, who presents the documentary.

‘The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we’re not actually fighting it properly. We’re not actually standing up to these people and saying, “It’s not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn’t justified.”‘

Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma said the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan by the United States during World War II was an inevitable way to end the war, a news report said Saturday.

“I understand that the bombing ended the war, and I think that it couldn’t be helped,” Kyodo News agency quoted Kyuma as saying in a speech at a university in Chiba, just east of Tokyo.

Kyuma’s remarks drew immediate criticism from Japanese atomic bomb survivors.

THE BBC is institutionally biased, an official report will conclude this week. The year-long investigation, commissioned by the BBC, has found the corporation particularly partial in its treatment of single-issue politics such as climate change, poverty, race and religion.

It concludes that the bias has extended across drama, comedy and entertainment, with the corporation pandering to politically motivated celebrities and trendy causes.

A senior Polish official has ordered psychologists to investigate whether the popular BBC TV show Teletubbies promotes a homosexual lifestyle.

The spokesperson for children’s rights in Poland, Ewa Sowinska, singled out Tinky Winky, the purple character with a triangular aerial on his head.

“I noticed he was carrying a woman’s handbag,” she told a magazine. “At first, I didn’t realise he was a boy.”

EU officials have criticised Polish government policy towards homosexuals.

Two West European MPs and a Russian gay rights leader have been arrested in Moscow, as violence broke out at a banned protest by gay rights activists.

Anti-homosexual protesters threw kicks, punches and eggs at the gay rights group, chanting “Moscow is not Sodom”.

The gay rights demonstrators were trying to deliver a petition to the mayor of Moscow, demanding the right to stage public marches.

MPs from Germany and Italy were reportedly among those arrested.

In what might be called political correctness v. menu tradition, round 2, the Blue Parrot restaurant in Louisville has decided not to rename the 88-year-old item it has always called a wopburger.

“We’ve had so many people coming in and calling us, telling us ‘I can’t believe you’re changing the name. Please don’t change the name,’” said Joan Riggins, who owns the restaurant with her father, Joseph Colacci and her brother Richard Colacci.

Riggins says her family knows that “when certain words are used a certain way, they can be derogatory in context.”

“But that was never meant to be that way with us,” she said. “We used the word to mean ‘Italian.’ It was a name we used without any meaning as a term of a endearment.”

Poland’s conservative prime minister rejected European Union criticism Thursday of a proposal to fire teachers for “homosexual propaganda,” saying it was not in the interest of society to have more gay people.

Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski said homosexuals did not face discrimination in his country, responding to an EU parliament vote to send a mission to Poland to investigate recent anti-gay comments by senior officials.

“Nobody is limiting gay rights in Poland,” Kaczynski told reporters hours after the vote.

“However, if we’re talking about not having homosexual propaganda in Polish schools, I fully agree with those who feel this way,” he said. “Such propaganda should not be in schools; it definitely doesn’t serve youth well.”

A Canadian man has been arrested after he was found walking around naked with a swastika taped to his body to mark Adolf Hitler’s birthday, police said on Friday.

Police in Nanaimo, British Columbia, on Canada’s Pacific coast, said they were called to the scene by concerned residents, and the man told them he was “honoring Hitler’s birthday.” He was detained and will undergo a psychiatric assessment.

A Belgian auto parts supplier has forbidden its workers to speak any language other than Dutch, even during their lunch break, and employees could be fired if they disobey.

“We have people from Italy, India, Poland, Algeria here. It’s to avoid cliques forming here and there,” said Geert Vermote, human resources manager of HP Pelzer in the town of Genk in Belgium’s Dutch-speaking Flanders region.

Language is a sensitive topic in Belgium, particularly in Flanders where locals and politicians are keen to promote the use of Dutch and prevent the encroachment of the country’s other main language, French.

White supremacists are holding a rock concert in Wellington tonight to commemorate Adolf Hitler’s birthday. The plan has appalled Jewish and anti-racist groups but they say, though the event is offensive, it is not illegal. The concert, organised by local branches of skinhead gang Hammerskins and neo-Nazi organisation Blood and Honour – which has been banned in parts of Europe, will bring Australian “viking rock” band Blood Red Eagle to play in Wellington tonight. Adolf Hitler was born on April 20.

Former Mayor Ed Koch surprised an almost exclusively black audience yesterday by telling the Rev. Al Sharpton he had spoiled his chance to become “a crossover leader” by refusing to apologize for “the Tawana Brawley hoax.” Koch was speaking at a conference sponsored by Sharpton’s National Action Network when he brought up his relations with Sharpton.

A video aired on German TV has shown an army recruit on firing practice being ordered to pretend he was in New York’s Bronx facing hostile African Americans. In the grainy 90-second video, the instructor tells the soldier to swear as he fires his gun. US civil rights leader, Al Sharpton, said it was outrageous to depict blacks as “target practice”.

German speakers can read more and watch the video here.

A radio station in the Poconos fired its longtime morning DJ on Wednesday for holding an on-air contest in which listeners were encouraged to say “nappy-headed ho,” the slur that got talk-show host Don Imus suspended.

Gary Smith, of the “Gary in the Morning” show on WSBG-FM in Stroudsburg, was fired after station management reviewed a tape of Tuesday’s broadcast, said Rick Musselman, executive vice president of station owner Nassau Broadcasting Partners L.P.

Smith told listeners to call WSBG and say “I’m a nappy-headed ho” for Tuesday’s “Phrase that Pays” contest, Musselman said. He said three of the listeners who called were awarded tickets to a NASCAR promotion at a local club.

Tony Blair yesterday claimed the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture. His remarks angered community leaders, who accused him of ignorance and failing to provide support for black-led efforts to tackle the problem.

NOTORIOUSLY opinionated television presenter Jeremy Clarkson has found himself embroiled in a row with the Malaysian government. Clarkson savaged the Perodua Kelisa mini in a review on the TV programme Top Gear. He said the model, 2,400 of which have sold in the UK, was “without doubt not just the worst car in its category, but in the world”. The BBC presenter suggested the car’s name sounded like a disease and he described the small, three-cylinder model as a “piece of junk” with no flair, no passion and designed just to make profit. He then further fuelled Malaysian ire by attacking a Kelisa with a sledgehammer, before suspending it from a crane and blowing it up.

Germans have been embarrassed by the fact that Adolf Hitler remains an honorary citizen of Bad Doberan, a town that will host the annual G8 summit.

The town council has held a special meeting to officially remove Hitler from the roll of honour.

Leaders from the world’s major industrial nations will meet in one of the town’s districts, Heiligendamm, in just over two months’ time.

Blond, blue-eyed Westerners probably can’t be as successful at Middle East diplomacy as Japanese with their “yellow faces,” Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso was quoted by media as saying on Wednesday.

“Japan is doing what Americans can’t do,” the Nikkei business daily quoted the gaffe-prone Aso as saying in a speech.

“Japanese are trusted. If (you have) blue eyes and blond hair, it’s probably no good,” he said.

“Luckily, we Japanese have yellow faces.”

German prosecutors on Tuesday charged the former lawyer for far-right activist Ernst Zundel with incitement, accusing her of denying the Holocaust and ending one of her legal filings with “Heil Hitler.”

Teachers deemed to be promoting “homosexual culture” in Polish schools will be fired, the deputy education minister said Thursday. But the minister, Miroslaw Orzechowski, also insisted that homosexual teachers would not be targeted. “There is no place for the promotion of homosexual culture” in Polish schools, Orzechowski, who has a key role in drawing up a new education law aimed at banning what his party called “homosexual propaganda” in schools, told the all-news station TVN24. He said the ministry still has not defined what it means by homosexual propaganda.

A compromise announced Tuesday will permanently return a brass cross to the chapel at the College of William and Mary. The move may defuse the outcry that met the president’s decision to remove the cross and prompted one donor to the college to rescind his pledged $12 million gift.

The 18-inch cross will be displayed prominently in a glass case, based on a recommendation made by a committee of alumni, students and others that President Gene R. Nichol created to study the issue. The cross had been on the altar since about 1940 during religious services and secular events at the publicly funded college. But in October, Nichol removed it to make Wren Chapel more welcoming to students of all faiths.

A photographer for a Cedar Rapids television station has been fired for urinating in a cemetery while covering the funeral of an Iowa soldier killed in Iraq.

Gerry Edwards of Center Point was dismissed in December by KGAN-TV, where he was a photographer for 24 years.

In November, Edwards was at a cemetery to cover the funeral procession for Sgt. James Musack, 23, of Riverside.

While waiting for the procession to arrive, Edwards urinated on the ground near a cemetery monument.

A journalist from a Kalona newspaper was nearby and photographed the incident. The editor sent the photo by e-mail to KGAN managers with a note that said, “Urinating behind a statue of Mary in a Catholic cemetery within clear view of a public road, not to mention the numerous members of the Army who were on hand for the funeral, is inexcusable.”

Cherokee Nation members voted Saturday to revoke the tribal citizenship of an estimated 2,800 descendants of the people the Cherokee once owned as slaves.

With all 32 precincts reporting, 76.6 percent had voted in favor of an amendment to the tribal constitution that would limit citizenship to descendants of “by blood” tribe members as listed on the federal Dawes Commission’s rolls from more than 100 years ago.

A San Francisco weekly newspaper that bills itself as “The Voice of Asian America” is facing harsh criticism from that very community for publishing a column Friday titled “Why I Hate Blacks.”

In the column, AsianWeek regular contributor Kenneth Eng listed “reasons” to discriminate against African Americans. The piece has been pulled from the newspaper’s Web site, but the print edition of the free paper, owned by the politically influential Fang family, was still available in news racks Monday.

Eng called himself an “Asian supremacist” in January in another installment of the column, which runs under the label “God of the Universe.”

Carnival parades accompanied by the shrieks of crowds and the thump of loud music drew crowds of an estimated 3 million people to three of Germany’s western cities Monday, but there were also complaints at crude humour by float designers.

A Muslim leader criticized a float in the city of Dusseldorf that satirically suggested Islam was not peaceful. The float carried two identical cartoon-style papier-mache figures, each wearing a suicide-bomber’s belt and carrying a dagger and a pistol.

The first was labelled ‘the cliche,’ the second was labelled ‘the reality.’ Both scowling figures were labelled ‘mullahs,’ a term used to describe both Shiite and Sunni clergy. The float was part of a carnival parade watched by more than half a million people in the western city of Dusseldorf.

‘This hasn’t got anything to do with humour,’ said Aiman A Mazyek, general secretary of the National Council of Muslims in Germany. ‘The message it gives me is: ‘We love our prejudices, we’ll stand up for them, even if they are flagrantly untrue.”

Small packets of sugar bearing the likeness of Adolf Hitler and carrying Holocaust jokes have been found in some cafes in Croatia, prompting an investigation, the office of the state prosecutor said on Monday.

“The local district attorney in (the eastern town of) Pozega has opened an investigation and is currently looking at the matter,” said Martina Mihordin.

The Novi List daily newspaper reported that officials at a small factory in Pozega have confirmed the sugar packs were produced on their premises.

Accusations of “extraordinary bad taste were levelled on Sunday after details emerged of an Austrian designer snapping nude photos at a former Nazi concentration camp.

The woman used the memorial site at the former Mauthausen death camp as backdrop for nude photos of herself, the news magazine Profil wrote in its latest edition.

The photos – shot in the late 1990s – show the woman naked and in sensual poses in front of a camp watchtower and before a sculpture depicting a dying soldier.

Profil quoted the woman – whom it did not name in its initial reports – as saying the photos were an “artistic thought experiment”.

A Jewish organization is demanding an apology from a Georgia legislator for a memo that says the teaching of evolution should be banned because it is a myth propagated by an ancient Jewish sect.

State Rep. Ben Bridges denies writing the memo, which attributes the Big Bang theory to Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism.

Bridges has long opposed the teaching of evolution in Georgia classrooms and has introduced legislation requiring only that “scientific fact” be taught.

A landlady who swore at two lesbian police officers fondling in her public house – The Old Cock – has been cleared of a public order offence.

Nikki Hackett was accused of banging her fists on a table and telling the pair: “We don’t want that ****ing thing or your sort in here.”

Uncomfortable onlookers saw the pair passionately kissing each other during a night out in the traditional pub, prompting swift action from Mrs Hackett.

At first, the “South of the Border Party” thrown by Santa Clara University students didn’t strike freshman Nadine Rasch as offensive. It seemed a cool event with nachos, sombreros, mariachi music and salsa dancing. And this being a college party, some tequila and Mexican beer were to be expected if not approved by the select “Jesuit university in Silicon Valley.”

But students came dressed as Latino janitors, gardeners, gangbangers and pregnant homegirls.

“I realized they’re making fun of me, because my dad worked so hard so I could have these opportunities, and they’re making fun of people for that,” said Rasch, 18, a finance major from Guatemala, who did not attend the party. “A lot of people have the idea that Mexicans or Latin Americans are all like that and that’s wrong.”

A Polish member of the European Parliament has caused outrage among European Jews with a tract saying that Judaism has no place in most of Europe, partly because Jews create their own ghettoes.

Professor Maciej Giertych, a non-affiliated MEP, also caused strong consternation in EU circles, not least because the tract bears the parliament’s logo and was available online Friday.

It was first distributed at the assembly in Strasbourg on Wednesday.

Designer Julien Macdonald has declared war on animal lovers protesting against his use of fur in London Fashion Week.

Some onlookers were shocked to see his autumn collection relied heavily on different types of fur – even to create an entire dress.

But he remained unrepentant, saying: “People who don’t like fur can p*ss off. I love fur. It’s a beautiful natural product from animals.”

Former Miami Heat superstar Tim Hardaway told a local sports radio show that he “hates gay people.”

The five time All Star was asked how he would deal with a gay teammate. “First of all I wouldn’t want him on my team,” said Hardaway. “Second of all, if he was on my team I would really distance myself from him because I don’t think that’s right and I don’t think he should be in the locker room when we’re in the locker room.”
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“Well, you know, I hate gay people,” Hardaway said in response to Le Batard. “I let it be known I don’t like gay people. I don’t like to be around gay people. I’m homophobic. It shouldn’t be in the world, in the United States, I don’t like it.”

If Muslims want to stay in the Netherlands, they should tear out half the Koran and throw it away. And they shouldn’t listen to the imam. Faction leader of the Freedom Party (PVV) Geert Wilders said this in an interview with daily newspaper De Pers on Tuesday.

He said the holy book of Islam contains “plenty of terrible things.” Wilders said once again that Islam is a violent religion. “If Mohammed lived here today, I would propose he be tarred and feathered as an extremist and driven out of the country,” he said.

An off-campus party that asked students to come dressed “politically incorrect” has prompted an investigation by Macalester College officials who learned one student was costumed as a Ku Klux Klan member and another wore blackface with a noose around his neck. Students at the private school told administrators about the Jan. 16 party on campus.

Opponents of Poland’s former communist regime reportedly want to pay a posthumous homage to US President Ronald Reagan by erecting his statue in the place of a Soviet-era monument. In an open letter to the mayor of the southwestern city of Katowice, the former anti-regime activists said that the staunchly anti-communist Reagan had been a “symbol of liberty,” the Polish news agency PAP reported. As a result, they said, he deserved to become the centrepiece of the city’s Freedom Square, replacing a monument to the Soviet troops who drove out the occupying Nazis in 1945.

The principal of an Islamic school has admitted that it uses textbooks which describe Jews as “apes” and Christians as “pigs” and has refused to withdraw them. Dr Sumaya Alyusuf confirmed that the offending books exist after former teacher Colin Cook, 57, alleged that children as young as five are taught from racist materials at the King Fahd Academy in Acton.

The minister of a Baptist church in South Portland asked for forgiveness Monday for frightening members of the Jewish community with a provocative newspaper advertisement that promoted his Sunday sermon about anti-Semitism.

The ad for the First Baptist Church appeared on the Religion & Values page of the Portland Press Herald on Saturday, touting a sermon titled, “The Only Way to Destroy the Jewish Race.”

The sermon was supportive of Jews but the words in the ad generated fear and anger, as well as complaints to the church and the newspaper.

A diplomatic gaffe marred Saturday’s inauguration of a China-financed stadium on this Caribbean island when a band performed the national anthem of Chinese rival Taiwan.

Chinese Ambassador Qian Hongshan and scores of blue-uniformed Chinese laborers who built the $40 million Queen’s Park stadium as a gift were visibly uncomfortable as Taiwan’s anthem echoed inside the 20,000-seat venue

Sen. Joe Biden expressed regret Saturday for describing presidential rival Barack Obama as an articulate and clean African-American, trying to stem damage to his nascent 2008 campaign. “So, how was your week?” Biden, D-Del., said as he took the podium at the Democratic National Committee’s winter meeting. He broke into a wide smile and then a chuckle as audience members laughed. Then he turned serious.

Don’t stone women to death, burn them or circumcise them, immigrants wishing to live in the town of Herouxville in Quebec, Canada, have been told. The rules come in a new town council declaration on culture that Muslims have branded shocking and insulting.

Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said.

A party held by some Clemson University students two weeks ago is causing controversy after pictures taken at the event ended up on the Internet. Some students say it was just for fun. Others say that it was racist.

The theme of the party was “Living the Dream,” but some Clemson students are calling it a nightmare. Pictures of the party were posted on facebook.com, showing at least one person in black-face paint, with others dressed in knitted caps and jerseys and some girls with stuffing padding their pants to make their behinds look larger. There’s an image of party-goers holding 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor.

Opposition parties in Japan are pressing Health Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa to step down for calling women “birth-giving machines”. The Democratic Party and two smaller parties are threatening to boycott budget hearings in parliament if Mr Yanagisawa, 71, does not quit.

The German authorities were preparing for criticism from the Jewish community after it was revealed that a Holocaust memorial in Berlin was being used as a public bathroom by tourists and by neo-Nazi sympathizers. The revelation in a Berlin newspaper is likely to trigger a new debate about how the Holocaust should be remembered in Germany.

Mayor Yury Luzhkov on Monday denounced gay rights parades as “satanic” and vowed that he would never allow such events to be held in the city.

Speaking during a Russian Orthodox Church conference at the Kremlin, Luzhkov said the city would reject any application to hold a gay pride parade and crack down on anyone who chose to march in defiance of the ban, just as it did in 2006.

“Last year, Moscow came under unprecedented pressure to sanction the gay parade, which can be described in no other way than as a satanic event,” Luzhkov said in televised comments. “We did not let the parade take place then, and we will not allow it in the future.”

The French Socialist Party has voted to expel a senior member for saying there are too many black players in the national football team.

What is a patriotic terrorist?

It is an American who claims to love his or her country while enjoying the enemy’s success against said country. It is a person who gets deeply offended if you question their patriotism, while also appearing to share the same ideals of the more spirited folk who like to blow up innocent people.

Patriotic terrorists love America with so much intensity that it appears to the untrained eye that they hate it. But it’s actually the most powerful form of “tough love” known to man, woman and Rosie O’Donnell. Patriotic terrorists love America so much that they realize it needs an intervention – and real terror is the only way to enable that intervention. In fact, to keep a mammoth, arrogant superpower like America in check, terrorism is the only thing we’ve got. Noam Chomsky knew this from the start, making him a patriotic terrorist of the highest order.

Authorities at Tarleton State University said they plan to investigate a Martin Luther King Jr. Day party that mocked black stereotypes by featuring fried chicken, malt liquor and faux gang apparel.”I feel like there is no excuse for this type of ignorance,” said Donald Ray Elder, president of the Stephenville school’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Photographs posted on social networking Web site Facebook.com showed partygoers wearing Afro wigs and fake gold and silver teeth. One photo showed students “mocking how African-Americans do step shows,” Elder said. In another picture, a student is dressed as Aunt Jemima and carries a gun.

Ségolène Royal, the French Socialist presidential candidate, sparked a diplomatic row with Canada yesterday after appearing to call for Quebec’s independence in the latest in a series of blunders.

Ms Royal, 53, touched a raw nerve when she backed demands for Quebec’s “freedom”, and was rebuked by Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister.
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They say that the woman who presented herself as a breath of fresh air in a tired, male-dominated political world has been revealed as worryingly inexperienced.

“She is extremely lightweight on serious and sensitive subjects,’ Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Defence Minister, said. She is backing Mr Sarkozy.

A second Channel 4 reality show is at the centre of a racism row after one contestant said she supported slavery.

Gap year student Lucy Buchanan, 18, is taking part in Shipwrecked, where two teams on desert islands compete to win a £70,000 prize. She also said she hated fat people and wanted a return of the British Empire.

Hundreds of Moslem Tartars brawled with Orthodox Christian Slavs in the centre of a Ukrainian provincial city on Thursday, the Interfax news agency reported.

A long-simmering conflict in Simferopol, the regional capital of the Black Sea peninsula Crimea, turned violent after more than 100 security personnel hired by a real estate company attempted evict Tartars living in an encampment built on a choice city lot.

More than a dozen persons were injured in fighting throughout the morning, four severely enough to require medical treatment. Police made six arrests, and suffered minor injuries themselves, said Oleksander Dombrovsky, a Simferopol police spokesman.

Hindus in Europe have joined forces against a German proposal to ban the display of the swastika across the European Union, a Hindu leader said. Ramesh Kallidai of the Hindu Forum of Britain said the swastika had been a symbol of peace for thousands of years before the Nazis adopted it. He said a ban on the symbol would discriminate against Hindus.

A Connecticut toymaker is hoping to strike a chord with its “Dope on a Rope” doll, a figure depicting former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his last moments, with a noose around his neck.

The school bus driver let Rachel Armstrong’s three kids board the bus Monday morning, but he warned them that he wouldn’t give them a ride home that afternoon, nor could they ever ride his route again. The problem: Armstrong’s 10-year-old twin girls and 8-year-old son speak English. The driver told them the route had been designated for non-English speakers only.

NEPAL’S hardline Maoist guerillas, on the brink of achieving effective government power in the Himalayan kingdom, have turned their attention to so-called “social pollutants” and denounced homosexuals as “a by-product of capitalism”. Emerging from a decade of fighting government forces, the insurgents have launched a clean-up drive against polygamy, polyandry, infidelity, drunkenness and homosexuality — even though many gays were previously aligned with the Maoists against the autocratic rule of the widely despised King Gyanendra.

A man unhappy with an Islamic association’s plans to build a mosque next to his property has staged pig races as a protest during afternoon prayers. Craig Baker, 46, sold merchandise and grilled sausages Friday for about 100 people who showed up in heavy rain. He insisted he wasn’t trying to offend anyone with the pigs, which are forbidden from the Muslim diet. “I am just defending my rights and my property,” Baker said. “They totally disrespected me and my family.”