Disgusting British bureaucrats again

Have some nausea tablets on hand when you read their totally dishonest final comment below. The hypocrisy is unbelievable

They are calling it the Battle of Birks Road. An indignant group of neighbours stood like David against the Goliath of local authority instransigence: council refusemen and their waste lorry. A dispute over the binmen's refusal to collect a backlog of rubbish developed into a tense, one-hour stand-off in the quiet cul-de-sac. Children and parents formed a human chain to prevent the lorry leaving. One resident parked his car across the road to block its departure. Tempers boiled. Police were called and eventually order was restored when the binmen backed down. The lorry duly collected all the rubbish bags and was waved on its way.

Residents of Birks Road, in Huddersfield, had become frustrated by Kirklees Council's failure to remove extra bags of rubbish which had built up after refuse collectors staged a two-day strike last month. After the stoppage, collections resumed but although the householders' bins were emptied as normal, the accumulated extra bags were left to rot at the side of the road. Residents say they contacted the council and were promised that a "rapid response" vehicle would be sent to collect the bags. Two weeks later, they were still lying on the road.

Patience finally snapped on Wednesday when the binmen arrived, several hours late, and again refused to clear away the excess rubbish. Neighbours offered to load the bags into the lorry themselves, but were told that was against the regulations.

Mark Copley, an electrician, finally snapped and made the first move by climbing into his car and trapping the dustcart inside the cul-de-sac. Mr Copley, 30, said he told the three refuse men: "I'm not having this. Move my rubbish and I'll move my car." His neighbour, Rebecca Jones, 32, said that as the blockade continued the council agreed to send a second vehicle to pick up the excess rubbish. When it arrived, "a guy in a shirt and tie appeared and said that to teach us a lesson they were not going to empty the bins in the street". It was then that a human chain, including children, was formed around the lorry.

"Finally, one of the men said they would clear the rubbish if we moved, so we did and they kept to their word. "We pay $288 a month in council tax. For them to strike when they feel like it and then not to collect our rubbish was just not on."

A council spokesman said: "The collection crews always do their best to collect everyone's waste," he said. "This minor incident was quickly resolved, in line with what we would expect of our collection crews."

Source



Some Leftism is clearly an inherited mental defect

A daughter of the US progressive Left, Joan Hinton helped to build the first atomic bomb, ran off to Red China, was later smeared as a spy, thrived in Mao Zedong's vicious Cultural Revolution, and today loathes what she mocks as "capitalism with Chinese characteristics".

But one aspect of Ms Hinton's eventful life astonishes most people she meets more than anything else: "A Maoist? Still?" queried one worldly Japanese reporter, as wide-eyed as if she'd found a trilobite in her salad. "Oh yes," Ms Hinton, 87, confirmed this week in Tokyo. "It would have been terrific if Mao had lived. Of course I was 100 per cent behind everything that happened in the Cultural Revolution -- it was a terrific experience."

She began to say there weren't many Maoists left in China, then corrected herself with the dry staccato laugh that punctuates almost every sentence. "Ha-ha-ha. There are! They're all over the countryside in China, you go to the peasants' houses and they all have pictures of Mao. It's very interesting -- they do, he's very much alive."

The Chinese Communist Party now attributes to Mao principal responsibility for the "grave Left error" of the Cultural Revolution and the preceding Great Leap Forward, which the party acknowledges cost 14 million lives. Ms Hinton and her husband, Erwin Engst, lived through those times but she refuses to acknowledge that history. "He was a terrific person and he liberated all the people -- he was not a monster at all."

But defending Mao is not what brought Ms Hinton to Japan for the first time since her particular slow boat to China ported briefly at Yokohama in 1948. Last week she visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki, places she first learned of as a young physicist, sitting in a Los Alamos theatrette in mid-August 1945. She remembers everyone staring in silence at film of the colossal atomic bomb sites until a strained voice broke the silence: "That is the flesh and blood of the Japanese people."

A month earlier, she had sneaked past army jeep patrols to a rise in the Alamogordo Desert 35km from the Trinity test site, where at dawn she watched in awe as the first atomic mushroom cloud roiled towards the stratosphere, vaporising clouds in its path and catching the first beams of sunrise. "It was beautiful, beautiful," she says.

Ms Hinton's road was already well sign-posted. Her brother, the Marxist agricultural scientist William H. Hinton, had been in China for most of the time since 1947, working on land reform and meeting Mao and Zhou Enlai. William's Yale room-mate, Engst, another radical agriculturalist, went to China in 1946. Ms Hinton married Engst in 1949 in remote northern Shaanxi province, heartland of revolutionary Maoism, and worked there on agricultural technology for more than a decade.

Back home in 1953-54, at the height of the McCarthyite persecution of Manhattan Project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ms Hinton briefly became "the blonde traitoress", though no real evidence emerged then or since that she had spied for the Reds or given information to their A-bomb projects. She kept her US passport. "I spent the rest of my life working on the mechanisation of agriculture in China, so I could work not on bombs that were going to hurt people but on things that would help people," she said.

Ms Hinton's part in the Cultural Revolution might not have been so benign, however. Wang Rongfen, then a Beijing student, was jailed for a decade for writing a letter of protest to Mao at the outset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Ms Hinton responded angrily to a 2003 documentary on the Cultural Revolution, Morning Sun, by William's daughter and Joan's niece, Carma Hinton.

Ms Wang alleged Carma's mother, Bertha Sneck, Joan Hinton and Erwin Engst signed a wallposter denouncing the "cow demons and snake spirits" of the Bureau of Foreign Experts, and demanded, in effect, that expatriates be allowed, or forced, to join the violent demonstrations and denunciations in the capital.

A 2001 magazine article describes Engst happily recalling those days of "raising hell" and Ms Hinton "even more enthusiastic: 'The capitalist roaders -- wham!' she laughs, pounding her palm with her fist".

These days, Joan Hinton lives quietly and works at the model dairy farm on the outskirts of Beijing where she and Engst settled. He died in 2003. Her mind is still sharp but her hearing and concentration are fading. When she travels abroad to speak, she needs Bill Engst, the second of her three children, to help by relaying questions and prompting her memory. Today's China is not the society Ms Hinton struggled to realise under Maoism. But it's the only country she cares to live in.

"You have to have a sense of humour, and a sense of history and a sense of struggle," she says. "Otherwise, how can you live?"

Source



Polygamy recognized in the Netherlands

Will the Mormon fundamentalists who have recently been persecuted in Texas on the basis of a hoax phone call now emigrate to Nederland?

Two Dutch cities have instructed their marriage registrars to recognize polygamous marriages of immigrants that have taken place in countries where having more than one wife is permitted, such as Morocco. Although polygamy is technically banned in the Netherlands, the marriages of Muslims who have several wives are now recognized by Dutch authorities in the cities of Rotterdam and Amsterdam, reports the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.

Until now, registrars in the major cities had been recording the irregular marriages of immigrants, but the Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS), where all marriages are registered nationally, has been removing these bigamous or polygamous marriages from its files, on the assumption that administrative errors had occurred, reports NIS News. The city councils of Amsterdam and Rotterdam have informed the CBS that the marriage records are not a mistake.

CBS researcher Jan Latten told NRC Handelsblad that the CBS would study whether or not to recognize the bigamous and polygamous marriages. "We will now investigate whether this can be regarded as a trend that was previously not recognised. If this is the case, it is our task to report this." "At present, it is not included in our statistics," Latten pointed out. "In the same way, we delete marriages involving fourteen-year-olds. A man with two wives just cannot exist by law."

Rotterdam city council spokesman T. Verhoeven said that bigamous and polygamous marriages are registered regularly, though government employees must inform the Public Prosecutors' Office (OM) if there is any suspicion of marriages of convenience or exploitation of women. "They are simply acknowledged. It is important for us to check that the documents are authentic and that the husband does not have Dutch nationality. Otherwise the construction is illegal," Verhoeven explained.

The Netherlands has for years pushed the boundary of what constitutes marriage, beginning with the decision to legalize homosexual "marriage" in 2001 - the first country in the world to do so.

In 2005 the Netherlands entered heretofore uncharted territory when a Dutch man and two women were given a license for their three-way civil union. In September, 2005 LifeSiteNews.com reported on the "co-habitation contract" entered into by the threesome. The man claimed that the arrangement was justified because there is no jealousy. "There is no jealousy because both women are bisexual. If they had been both hetero, it would be more difficult." The arrangement was given government sanction after it was confirmed before a notary who duly registered it as a legal civil union.

Source



When "tolerance" kills

Distaste for homosexuality is normal and almost certainly hardwired so flaunting it is unwise

The family of a gay teenager who was fatally shot in class blames the school district for allowing their son to wear makeup and feminine clothing to school - factors the family claims led to the death. The parents and brother of 15-year-old Larry King of Oxnard filed a personal injury claim against the Hueneme school district seeking unspecified damages for not enforcing the dress code, The Ventura County Star reported.

King, an eighth-grader at E.O. Green Junior High School, was shot in February. Classmate Brandon McInerney pleaded not guilty to the shooting last week. He was charged as an adult and also faces a charge of a committing a hate crime.

The family's claim, filed last week in Ventura County Superior Court, said administrators and teachers failed to enforce the school's dress code when King wore feminine clothing and makeup to school. His parents, Dawn and Gregory King, said faculty members knew their son had "unique vulnerabilities" and was subject to abuse because of his sexual orientation.

King was a ward of the court and living at a shelter for abused, neglected and emotionally troubled children at the time of the shooting. A call for comment to district Superintendent Jerry Dannenberg was not immediately returned. State law requires individuals to file a claim before proceeding with a lawsuit against a public agency.

Source. More details here

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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