Thursday, September 27, 2012

Freed Brazilian death squad leader killed in Sao Paulo




Rio policemen in the Chatuba communityIn recent years, police in Brazil have worked on a number of confidence-building initiatives
Police in Brazil are searching for the killers of the former head of a Sao Paulo death squad who was shot a month after being released from a lengthy jail term.
Florisvaldo de Oliveira, an ex-policeman known as Corporal Bruno, had served nearly 30 years for murdering at least 50 people.
He was shot dead in an ambush as he drove his family home from church.
During his jail sentence, he became pastor of an evangelical church.
Corporal Bruno was first arrested in 1983.
He was sentenced for leading a group that killed dozens of people and also extorted shop owners in the outskirts of Brazil's largest city.
He served 27 years of his sentence and was released early from prison on the grounds of good behaviour. He left jail on 23 August.
"Extra-judicial killing" Corporal Bruno was driving near his home on Wednesday night in Sao Paulo state when two gunmen stopped his car and fired more than 20 shots at him.
No one else was hurt in the attack in the city of Pindamonhangaba.
"All the signs seem to indicate that it was an extra-judicial killing, but we will only find out after the police investigation," said Lt Mario Tonini.
The involvement of Brazilian police officers in death squads and other criminal organisations during the military government in the 1960s and the 70s is well documented.
The situation has changed and the police have worked on a number of confidence-building initiatives in their communities.
But the human rights group, Amnesty International, says the problem still persists in many parts of the country.
"Police officers were believed to be involved in death squads and milicias [militias] engaged in social cleansing, extortion, as well as in trafficking in arms and drugs," says Amnesty's latest report on Brazil.
"In Sao Paulo a report by the civil police attributed 150 deaths between 2006 and 2010 to death squads in the north and east of the city."

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Who stole my cheese?



It has been a bizarre summer for Canadian culinary capers.
In July we learned of a honey producer there who was robbed of 3 million bees. In August, there were reports that $30 million worth of maple syrup had gone missing from Quebec's strategic reserves.
Now, as summer draws to an end, reports have surfaced of a vast cheese-smuggling operation in Ontario. No joke.
The alleged scam, reports CBC News, hinges on smugglers sneaking cases of "brick" cheese from the U.S. into Canada, then selling it to restaurants and pizzerias.
Because of restrictions by the Canadian Dairy Board, cheese is markedly cheaper south of the border, meaning that a case of American smuggled cheese could go for $150, while the same cheese produced in Canada would cost around $240. According to the CBC, one trip for a cheese smuggler could earn between $1,000 and $2,000.
And this isn't just fly-by-night cheese smuggling, either. The Ottawa Sun has reason to believe some Niagara Falls cops may be in on the deal. When pressed, Const. Derek Watson told the paper yesterday the force cannot "deny or confirm allegations of any ongoing investigation."
Reached for comment by the UPI, Brandon Elms at Volcano Pizzeria in Fonthill, west of Niagara Falls, said he'd been approached a couple times by Canadian investigators trying to track down the sources of discounted dairy.
"We get all our stuff legit," he said. "We thought it was a joke at first. Who is going to go around trying to sell smuggled cheese? The cheese bandits, the mozzarella mafia!"


Wednesday, September 19, 2012

A French magazine ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad

http://www.scribd.com/doc/106421451



French Weekly Publishes Muhammad Cartoons

By REUTERS
Published: September 19, 2012 at 10:19 AM ET 
 
PARIS (Reuters) - A French magazine ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad on Wednesday by portraying him naked in cartoons, threatening to fuel the anger of Muslims around the world who are already incensed by a California-made video depicting him as a lecherous fool.

The drawings in the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo risked exacerbating a crisis that has seen the storming of U.S. and other Western embassies, the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and a deadly suicide bombing in Afghanistan.
Riot police were deployed to protect the paper's Paris offices after the issue hit news stands.
It featured several caricatures of the Prophet showing him naked in what the publishers said was an attempt to poke fun at the furor over the film. One, entitled "Mohammad: a star is born", depicted a bearded figure crouching over to display his buttocks and genitals.
The French government, which had urged the weekly not to print the cartoons, said it was shutting embassies and schools in 20 countries as a precaution on Friday, when protests sometimes break out after Muslim prayers.
Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby called the drawings outrageous but said those who were offended by them should "use peaceful means to express their firm rejection".
Tunisia's ruling Islamist party, Ennahda, condemned what it called an act of "aggression" against Mohammad but urged Muslims not to fall into a trap intended to "derail the Arab Spring and turn it into a conflict with the West".
In the northern Paris suburb of Sarcelles, one person was slightly hurt when two masked men threw a small explosive device through the window of a kosher supermarket. Police said it was too early to link the incident to the cartoons. One small local Muslim group filed a legal complaint against the weekly but there were no reports of reaction on the streets of France.
The posting on YouTube of a crude video, made in the United States and available on YouTube since July, that mocked Mohammad as a womanising buffoon has sparked protests in many countries, some of them deadly.
The U.S. envoy to Libya and three other Americans were killed in an attack in Benghazi, and U.S. and other foreign embassies were attacked in cities in Asia, Africa and the Middle East by furious Muslims.
Matthew Olsen, director of the U.S. government's National Counterterrorism Center, branded the Benghazi assault a "terrorist attack" and said officials were examining the possibility that individuals involved in the attack may have links to al Qaeda, and particularly the affiliate group al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
INTERNATIONAL DEBATE
The furor has emerged as an issue in the U.S. presidential election campaign and sparked international debate over free speech, religion and the right to offend. Many Muslims consider any representation of Allah or the Prophet Mohammad blasphemous.
In Los Angeles, an actress who appeared in the video filed a lawsuit against a Coptic Christian man linked to the film, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, accusing him of fraud and slander and asking that the film's trailer be removed from the Internet.
It was the first known civil lawsuit connected to the film that has circulated online as a 13-minute trailer, including under the title "Innocence of Muslims."
The actress, Cindy Lee Garcia, also named Google Inc and its YouTube unit as defendants. Garcia's lawsuit stated that she thought she was appearing in a desert adventure film, not a "hateful" production about the Muslim prophet.
The United States has condemned the content of the video while defending the right to free speech, and took a similar line on the French cartoons.
"We know that these images will be deeply offensive to many and have the potential to be inflammatory. But we've spoken repeatedly about the importance of upholding the freedom of expression that is enshrined in our constitution," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.
"In other words, we don't question the right of something like this to be published; we just question the judgment behind the decision to publish it."
In the Lebanese city of Sidon, around 10,000 people joined a march organized by the Shi'ite group Hezbollah to protest against the film and the cartoons, shouting "Enough humiliation!" and "Death to America! Death to Israel!".
In Egypt, Essam Erian, acting head of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, told Reuters: "We reject and condemn the French cartoons that dishonor the Prophet and we condemn any action that defames the sacred according to people's beliefs."
At the same time, rights groups demanded the release of a Coptic Christian computer science graduate who they said had been beaten up and arrested in Cairo on suspicion of re-posting the anti-Islam video online.
In France, a joint statement by Catholic bishop Michel Dubost and Mohammed Moussaoui, president of the French Muslim Council, defended the right to freedom of expression under the cherished French principles of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity".
"But freedom endangers itself if it forgets fraternity and respect for everyone's equal right to dignity," they added.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius called the publication of the cartoons a provocation.
"We saw what happened last week in Libya and in other countries such as Afghanistan," he told a regular news conference. "We have to call on all to behave responsibly."
CALL FOR CAUTION
France's ambassador to Iran sent French citizens there a message urging them to exercise great caution, especially on Friday, and around diplomatic missions and places of worship.
But Charlie Hebdo's editor, Stephane Charbonnier, rejected the criticism. "We have the impression that it's officially allowed for Charlie Hebdo to attack the Catholic far-right but we cannot poke fun at fundamental Islamists," he said.
"It shows the climate. Everyone is driven by fear, and that is exactly what this small handful of extremists who do not represent anyone want: to make everyone afraid, to shut us all in a cave," he told Reuters.
One cartoon alluded to the scandal over a French magazine's publication of topless photos of the wife of Britain's Prince William. It showed a bare female torso topped by a beard with the caption "Riots in Arab countries after photos of Mrs Mohammad are published".
Charlie Hebdo is no stranger to controversy. Its Paris offices were firebombed last November after it published a mocking caricature of Mohammad, and Charbonnier has been under police guard ever since.
Speaking outside his offices in an eastern neighborhood with many residents of North African origin, Charbonnier said he had not received any threats over the latest cartoons. In a message on its Twitter account, Charlie Hebdo said its website had been hacked, but referred readers to a blog it also uses.
In 2005, Danish cartoons of the Prophet sparked a wave of protests across the Muslim world in which at least 50 died.
France is already on alert for attacks by al Qaeda on French interests in West Africa.
A diplomatic source said this week that Paris had recently foiled attacks on economic and diplomatic targets and had credible evidence that more were planned.
"Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is a direct and immediate threat," the source said.
(Additional reporting by Shreya Banerjee, Thierry Chiarello, Brian Love and John Irish, Marwa Awad in Cairo, Souhail Karam in Tunis, Margaret Chadbourn in Washington and Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles; Writing by Mark John; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Jackie Frank)

Friday, September 14, 2012

Lessons from the 'World's Ugliest Woman': 'Stop Staring and Start Learning

Lizzie Velasquez, author of Be Yourself, Be Beautiful.When she was in high school, Lizzie Velasquez was dubbed "The World's Ugliest Woman" in an 8-second-long YouTube video. Born with a medical condition so rare that just two other people in the world are thought to have it, Velasquez has no adipose tissue and cannot create muscle, store energy, or gain weight. She has zero percent body fat and weighs just 60 pounds.

In the comments on YouTube, viewers called her "it" and "monster" and encouraged her to kill herself. Instead, Velasquez set four goals: To become a motivational speaker, to publish a book, to graduate college, and to build a family and a career for herself.

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Now 23 years old, she's been a motivational speaker for seven years and has given more than 200 workshops on embracing uniqueness, dealing with bullies, and overcoming obstacles. She's a senior majoring in Communications at Texas State University in San Marcos, where she lives with her best friend. Her first book, "Lizzie Beautiful," came out in 2010 and her second, "Be Beautiful, Be You," was published earlier this month.

"The stares are what I'm really dealing with in public right now," she told Dr. Drew Pinsky in an interview on CNN's Headline News this week. "But I think I'm getting to the point where… instead of sitting by and watching people judge me, I'm starting to want to go up to these people and introduce myself or give them my card and say, 'Hi, I'm Lizzie. Maybe you should stop staring and start learning'."

Velasquez was born in San Antonio, Texas; she was four weeks premature and weighed just 2 pounds, 10 ounces. "They told us they had no idea how she could have survived," her mother, Rita, 45, told the Daily Mail. "We had to buy doll's clothes from the toy store because baby clothes were too big." Doctors warned Rita and her husband, Lupe, that their oldest child would never be able to walk or talk, let alone live a normal life. (Her two younger siblings were not affected by the syndrome.)

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Instead, she has thrived. Her internal organs, brain, and bones developed normally, though her body is tiny. Since she has no fatty tissue in which to store nutrients, she has to eat every 15 to 20 minutes to have enough energy to get through the day. One brown eye started clouding over when she was 4 years old, and now she's blind in that eye and has only limited sight in the other.

"Some days life doesn't make sense," she writes in "Be Beautiful, Be You." "You just have to change what you can, ask for help and pray about the rest."

She notes her triumphs and posts inspirational messages on Tumblr, and says that she's learned to embrace the things that make her unique. Instead of trying to retaliate against people who have made her feel badly, she sets goals for herself and pushes herself to succeed in spite of the haters. She's even reclaimed YouTube, video blogging about everything from bullying to hair-styling tips to staying positive.

"I feel really glad that I don't look like the celebrities out there that are so beautiful," she told Dr. Drew. "There's a lot of stereotypes attached to that." Not looking like a supermodel "gives people the opportunity to know you personally," she explains. "If they're willing to take that extra step they'll get to know the person you really are."

Of course, the horrible comments left on that old YouTube video stung (the video has since been removed, but Velasquez says she read every single comment). Now, she says, she understands that they're "just words."

"I'm human, and of course these things are going to hurt," she said. "Their judgements of me isn't who I am, and I'm not going to let these things define me."

"I didn't sink down to their level," she said in a follow-up video on YouTube last year. "Instead, I got my revenge through my accomplishments and determination. In the battle between the 'World's Ugliest Woman' video vs. me, I think I won."

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Let the Pussy Riot go free

http://www.scribd.com/doc/105823936



Medvedev Says Rockers Have Served Enough Jail Time for Cathedral Performance

By ELLEN BARRY
MOSCOW — Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev said Wednesday that he believed that three female punk rockers jailed for a profane stunt in Moscow’s main Russian Orthodox cathedral should be released rather than serve out their two-year sentences, weighing in on a case that has drawn widespread condemnation in the West.
At a meeting with officials from United Russia, the pro-Kremlin party that he leads, Mr. Medvedev was careful to assure his audience that he did not approve of the women’s performance of an anti-Kremlin song at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, saying that even thinking about it made him nauseated.
But he went on to say that further incarceration would be “unproductive” — the most explicit commentary to come from a high-ranking official since the Aug. 17 sentencing.
“Imprisonment is a very severe — I would even say a frightening — responsibility,” Mr. Medvedev said. “What has already happened — that this well-known group of girls have been in prison quite a long time — is a very serious punishment for everything they did, regardless of the sentence.”
The six months they have already served, he said in remarks that were shown on television, is “fully enough to make them think about what happened, because of their stupidity or for some other reasons.”
“So prolonging their time in conditions of imprisonment seems not to be productive,” he added.
It is not clear whether Mr. Medvedev’s words will have any effect, but a lawyer for the punk rockers, who perform as Pussy Riot, said he thought that the Russian authorities might want to rid themselves of a case that has turned out to be more damaging than expected.
“In the end the authorities got themselves caught in a trap,” the lawyer, Nikolai Polozov, told the radio station Kommersant-FM. “The international community gives an unambiguous assessment of this case, and Russia’s reputation is rapidly falling, and the authorities are trying to find some solution so that they can emerge from this episode with a pretty face.”
Mr. Medvedev, who was president from 2008 until May, attracted support from urban liberals during his term, and his agreement to step down to make way for Vladimir V. Putin’s return as president helped set off protests last winter. He has said little about the raft of repressive measures introduced since he stepped down, or about Pussy Riot, which has been held up by pro-Kremlin commentators as an example of dangerous radicalism that has infected Russian society and must be stamped out.
A film that ran on Tuesday on the state-controlled Rossiya-1 channel asserted that Pussy Riot’s performance was planned and financed by an exiled tycoon, Boris Berezovsky, an enemy of Mr. Putin’s.
In August, shortly before the sentencing, Mr. Putin himself said he did not believe that the three women “should be judged too severely for this.” Though they could have received a sentence of as much as seven years, prosecutors requested a three-year sentence, and a judge gave them two.
Mr. Polozov noted that Mr. Medvedev had also taken a personal interest in the case of Taisia Osipova, the wife of an opposition activist who was charged with drug violations that her supporters said were trumped up.
Mr. Medvedev’s involvement evidently did her no good — a judge last month sentenced her to eight years in prison, double the time that prosecutors had requested.
“Obviously, you can’t say that the judge will do whatever Dmitri Anatolievich says,” he said. “But if the judge shares his opinion, obviously we would consider that a plus.”