Wednesday, November 05, 2014



Crooked Multicultural doctor in Britain



A doctor faces a potential jail term for secretly moonlighting in other jobs while claiming more than £29,000 in sick pay from his own hospital.

Dr Anthony Madu, 45, carried out well-paid locum work at other hospitals around the country while on sick leave from his job with the Cardiff and Vale University Health Board in Wales.

NHS bosses had to pay £20,000 to other doctors to cover Madu, meaning the bill for his dishonesty came to around £50,000.

He was convicted of six counts of fraud today and was remanded in custody until he can be sentenced next month.

Madu was given the specialist registrar obstetrics gynaecology post at the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff, in August 2009.

But he was suspended two months later over allegations about his conduct towards other staff and claims he had falsified his training record, the court heard.

From January 2010, he then submitted sick notes on three different occasions, saying he could not work because of stress.

Madu then made 'tens of thousands of pounds' while working for Sandwell General Hospital in Birmingham as well as Scarborough General Hospital and The Royal Oldham Hospital in Greater Manchester, the jury heard.

Prosecutor Christian Jowett said: 'He was legally obliged to tell his employers about his work but he did not do so.

'He was also legally obliged to tell two locum agencies that he was on extended leave and had been granted sickness leave.

'But he continued to work and receive payment from both Cardiff and Vale University Health Board and his work in England.

'This was a very costly business for the NHS and very lucrative for Dr Madu - that's why he did it. Madu had been irresponsible as well as dishonest.'

The prosecution said the total cost to the Welsh NHS for covering his absence was £49,000 and Madu received more than £100,000 for working as a locum and £29,000 in sick pay.

He was convicted of failing to declare to Cardiff and Vale University Health Board (CVUHB) he had taken secondary employment, that he had failed to tell two different agencies, Medacs and JCJ, he had been signed off sick and that he did not declare to either agency he had been suspended.

Remanding Madu in custody at Cardiff Crown Court today, Judge David Wynn Morgan said: 'It may well be a tragedy has been avoided by the timely actions by the health board.' Madu will be sentenced on November 28.

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'Human rights’ in Britain have fallen into the hands of the Euro-tollahs

Lawyers in Strasbourg forget that laying down the law only works if it is the wish of the people

The rule of law, yes, but what about the rule of lawyers? In a democracy, the first is good; the second is bad. Abraham Lincoln got it right in his first inauguration as US president: “If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court … the people will have ceased … to be their own rulers.” It is even worse if the lawyers doing the ruling sit in Strasbourg.

This has happened to Britain. It explains why the term “human rights”, like “health and safety”, has become something between a curse and a joke. Human rights, in the public mind, are now a set of arcane rules designed to protect bad people from the rigours of the law. After Strasbourg ordered us to give prisoners the vote, the Conservatives felt they had to fight back. They recently set out plans to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) at Strasbourg unless it agrees that in future its judgments on Britain will be advisory only.

On the face of it, this seems an almost shocking thing to propose. The European Convention, British-drafted, is a lucid exposition of rights which we hold dear (and which we often invented) – the right to a fair trial, the prohibition of torture, etc. When it was agreed in 1950, it expressed the collective determination of the non-Communist European countries to prevent Nazism’s revival and Stalinism’s encroachment.

But the Convention is one thing, and its interpretation is something else. Lord Sumption is one of our few top judges with the courage to face this problem. In a big speech last year, he took Article 8 of the original Convention as his example. This guarantees everyone’s right to a “respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence”.

 “This perfectly straightforward provision was originally devised,” he said, “as a protection against the surveillance state by totalitarian governments. But in the hands of the Strasbourg court it has been extended to cover the legal status of illegitimate children, immigration and deportation, extradition, aspects of criminal sentencing, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide, child abduction, the law of landlord and tenant, and a great deal else besides. None of these extensions are warranted by the express language of the Convention.”

Why is this bad? Not necessarily because of the particular views the judges take, but because they have no right to take them. They are annexing political and social questions and turning them into law. Many of these judges at Strasbourg are not up to the job. Often they are inexperienced, or political appointees (or both). Because the Council of Europe has 47 members, some of them come from countries – Albania, Romania, Russia – where the rule of law lacks, shall we say, deep roots. This rubs salt in the British wound, but it is not really the point. The point is the power grab. Too often our own learned senior British judges are equally keen on it.

They believe that the rule of law is too pure and beautiful a thing to be sullied by politicians, or even by the public. Judges speak darkly of “the rule of the majority” and “elected dictatorship”.

They are right to warn against mob rule. But, as Norman Tebbit crisply put it in a House of Lords debate on Monday, when the judges fought off a Government effort to halt the spread of judicial review, “I don’t like unelected dictatorships, even if they sit in law courts.”

By taking Article 8, for instance, and stretching it from its simple original meaning into a doctrine of total personal autonomy, you are radically changing each society affected. If your ruling is made in Strasbourg, it is imposed on often faraway countries of which you may know little. Yet it binds our Parliament. “Unelected dictatorship” is not far wrong.

The lawyers prefer to describe the Convention as a “living instrument” – something their brilliant minds can fashion for new tasks. But when such rulings are imposed on a country like ours, that instrument becomes a blunt one.

They forget the Convention’s very own preamble, which says that the “fundamental freedoms which are the foundations of peace and justice in the world are best maintained … by an effective political democracy” combined with human rights. If we cannot make our own laws, we cannot have an effective democracy. Without democracy, “human rights” fall into the hands of the secular imams of the international judiciary; they become the sharia of the Euro-tollahs.

In Britain, we are so fed up with our politicians that we forget we put them there. We see the law as an assertion of the rights of the individual against the state. It should be that, in part. But it should also be the wishes of the people, expressed in legislation made by those we choose for the task. The messy political battles out of which laws are forged are actually better than the high-altitude cogitations of great judicial minds, because they test what will and won’t work. They win consent. Without consent, no law works.

Once “human rights”, in their modern sense, get a grip, a legal bureaucracy takes charge. Any public body, for example, can be sued for denying a person’s “right to life” by not envisaging every possible occasion when that life might be endangered. Such bodies therefore live in fear. The police and Armed Forces have to preface their decisions with elaborate plans against what might go wrong. On foreign battlefields, such restrictions are tragicomic. The financial and moral cost is huge.

Such imposed rights can lead to actual inhumanity. Just now, a row is raging in the world of adults with learning disabilities, because charities and local authorities are trying to break up residential communities where such people live together. In doing so, these authorities often invoke Article 5 of the Strasbourg Convention – the right to liberty – in order to insist that the disabled live “independently”, i.e. alone. It is a pretty lonely liberty compared with the care they currently receive.

This dictatorship of abstract rights is getting worse because Strasbourg, which in origin has nothing to do with the EU, is now bound up with it. The Charter of Fundamental Rights in the Lisbon Treaty takes the Convention and builds on it with baroque detail. Strasbourg is as nothing beside the self-aggrandising of the European Court of Justice (the court of the EU) in Luxembourg. Currently, the EU is trying to accede to the ECHR, which would take away what small national purchase we have on Strasbourg. If we don’t get out, we shall get even deeper in.

By way of reassurance, the Tories say that if they repeal the Human Rights Act they will introduce a British Bill of Rights instead. I wonder if that is such a brilliant idea. Most of our own judges will fall on it as hungrily as they did on Strasbourg. Would it not be better to use the Strasbourg Convention as an advisory manual and leave it at that? Our own Common Law has spent hundreds of years establishing rights that work. Australia, a Common Law country, has no national human rights system. Does anyone think Australian human beings lack decent rights?

When Strasbourg told us we must give prisoners the vote, David Cameron said the idea made him physically sick. I’m not sure that its effect on his digestion matters much. But the state of our body politic does. “Europe” makes it sickly all the time. As Mr Cameron is belatedly learning, it will be the work of an entire generation (perhaps more) to restore it to health.

SOURCE





Russian memorial to Steve Jobs dismantled after Apple CEO comes out as gay

A memorial to Apple founder Steve Jobs has been dismantled in St. Petersburg after the man who succeeded him at the helm of the company, Tim Cook, came out as gay.

The two metre high monument, in the shape of an iPhone, was erected outside a college in January 2013 by a Russian group of companies called ZEFS.

Citing the need to abide by a law combating "gay propaganda," ZEFS said the memorial had been removed on Friday — the day after Mr Cook announced he was homosexual.

"In Russia, gay propaganda and other sexual perversions among minors are prohibited by law," ZEFS said, noting that the memorial had been "in an area of direct access for young students and scholars."

"After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy, the monument was taken down to abide to the Russian federal law protecting children from information promoting denial of traditional family values."

Promoting "traditional values," President Vladimir Putin last year signed a law prohibiting the spread of "gay propaganda" among minors.

Putin says there is no discrimination against gay people in Russia and the law was needed only to protect young people, although members of the gay community say its passage has increased problems for them.

Cook said he had decided to come out to help move forward civil rights, confirming a fact that had been widely known in the Silicon Valley tech community but was rarely discussed.

Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, was not gay.

Vitaly Milonov, a St. Petersburg legislator who has campaigned against gay rights and was among legislators behind the law signed by Putin, has called for Apple's CEO to be barred entrance to Russia.

Maxim Dolgopolov, the head of ZEFS who ordered the removal of the monument, expressed opposition to personal sanctions in Monday's statement, but supported the "protection of traditional values" by law.

"Sin should not become the norm. There is nothing to do in Russia for whose who intend to violate our laws," he said.

SOURCE





The feelgood "Pastor" is an ignoramus

Mega-church pastor Joel Osteen may lead the largest Protestant church in the United States, but a recent Facebook post shows he might need to go back to Sunday school.

A Monday post to his verified Facebook page, Joel Osteen ministries, read: “God said in Numbers 11:23, ‘Moses, is there any limit to My power?’ He was saying, ‘Moses, you saw Me part the Red Sea, stop the sun for Joshua, keep three Hebrew teenagers safe in a fiery furnace, don’t you realize that I can bring water without rain?’ There’s no limit to God’s power.”

There’s just one problem: According to the Bible, Moses was dead before Joshua asked God to stop the setting of the sun, and long before the three Hebrew youths were burned in the furnace.

The Old Testament Book of Joshua explains that God appointed Joshua as Moses’s successor after Moses’s death (the first sentence literally begins, “After the death of Moses…”), who led the Israelites into battle against the Amorites, during which he commanded the sun and the moon not to move. “So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the people had revenge upon their enemies,” (Joshua 10:13).

The story of the “three holy children,” as the Hebrew youths are sometimes known, is told in the Old Testament Book of Daniel. According to the passage, the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, who reigned around the 6th century B.C. (long, long after the projected time of Moses), ordered his people to worship a large golden idol, “and whoever does not fall down and worship shall be cast immediately into the midst of a burning fiery furnace,” (Daniel 3:6). The three Hebrew youths refused to worship the idol and were thrown into the furnace, but were not burned.

In many Christian traditions this passage is particularly important because it is understood to prefigure Christ — when the king asked whether the three were burned, one of his counselors replied “I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire; and they are not hurt, and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God,” (Daniel 3:25).

Some of Osteen’s followers noticed the error, with one commenter asking “Bro, do you even Scripture?”

Osteen, who has neither a bachelor’s nor a divinity degree, lives in a $10 million dollar mansion in Houston, Texas, and has an estimated net worth of $40 million. Nearly 50,000 people attend services at Lakewood Church every week, and millions more watch his televised sermons. Lakewood, whose “central campus” is a 16,000-seat arena, is notable for its total lack of crosses and other Christian symbols or imagery.

SOURCE

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

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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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