Sunday, April 03, 2016



Multiculturalist charged with murder of mother of three and her 'lover' after bloodbath knife attack in which two of her sons, aged 20 and 17, were also injured
   


A 53-year-old man has been charged with the murder of a mother of three and her ‘lover’ who were stabbed to death in a 'bloodbath' knife attack which also left two of her sons seriously injured.

Foster Christian has been charged with two counts of murder and two counts of GBH following the deaths of Natasha Sadler, 40, and boyfriend Simon Gorecki, 47, in Canterbury, Kent.

Christian was arrested following the incident on Tuesday night, which also left Ms Sadler’s 17-year-old son Brandon in a critical condition in hospital and her other son Connaugh Harris, 20, injured.

Christian, a mechanic who is thought to live in the property which Ms Sadler and Mr Gorecki were stabbed outside of, was charged at 8pm last night after police were given more time to question him.

He will now appear before Medway Magistrates' Court today via video link.

Post mortem examinations of Ms Sadler and fishmonger Mr Gorecki were due to take place today.

Officers were called to a report of an 'altercation' at a residential property in Dickens Avenue, Canterbury, shortly before 8pm on Tuesday.

Neighbour Rab Hendry, 50, said he helped one of the victims' wounds with tea towels. He told how one person had told him he had been stabbed.

He then saw two people, who he believed were brothers. The older one had been apparently stabbed in the arm, while the other was thought to have been stabbed in the stomach.

A Kent Police spokesman said officers believe the victims and Christian were known to each other.

Last night, Ms Sadler's son Connough Harris paid tribute to her after being released from hospital.  He posted a photo of her on Facebook, and accompanied it with: 'Forever in my thoughts mum.'

Warren Harlow - the father of Ms Sadler's youngest son Chase, five, who was not present at the time of the incident - also paid tribute to her.  'Natasha I love you my girl. So sorry I wasn't there to protect you when you needed me most xxxxxx,' he wrote on Facebook.

Forensic officers in white suits were seen going in and out of the semi-detached house as two officers stood guard outside.

Another neighbour, who declined to be named, believed the property housed people who had been placed there by the authorities.

She said: 'It's been like that for years. There have been some nice people living there who have been polite.

'Something like this happening round here is very unusual. I'm 49 and have been here since three months old, and it's been fine.

'I just saw flashing lights last night. My partner told me there was a tent in the garden where presumably they are doing forensics.'

A spokesman for Kent Police said: 'Officers attended and found two people had sustained fatal injuries. One was a 40 year-old woman from Canterbury, and her next of kin have been informed. Inquiries are on-going to locate the next of kin of a man who also died at the scene.

'A 53 year-old man was arrested at the scene on suspicion of murder and remains in police custody. He is known to victims, but not related.

'A further two men aged 17 and 20 years-old sustained injuries and were taken to a local hospital. The 20-year-old remains in a critical condition.

SOURCE





Audiences Are Once Again Flocking to Faith-Based Films

That’s the conclusion of Bloomberg Businessweek reporter David Walters, who recently posted an article about the new popularity of Christian films.

Walters reports that "faith-based" films are experiencing a resurgence after a fallow period of several decades. Movies like “The 10 Commandments” and “Ben-Hur” were hugely popular in the 1950s – “The 10 Commandments” is, adjusted for inflation, the sixth-highest grossing domestic movie of all time - but interest in the genre cooled off until Mel Gibson’s 2004 “The Passion of the Christ,” which grossed over $600 million on a $30 million budget.

Walters observes that in 2016 a new crop of Christian films such as “Miracles from Heaven” and “Risen” are doing well at the box office:

Industry watchers assumed that Miracles and Risen would earn money slowly and steadily leading up to the Easter holiday. Instead, they surged in their opening weekends. Risen out-earned buzzy horror flick The Witch and Jesse Owens biopic Race, trailing only Marvel’s Deadpool and DreamWorks Pictures’ Kung Fu Panda 3. Miracles recouped its $13 million production budget in just four days, knocking the J.J. Abrams-produced 10 Cloverfield Lane out of the top three earners for the week. Explain it however you want: savvy positioning or divine intervention. But when it comes to box office returns, God is good and only getting better.

“Miracles from Heaven” was budgeted at $13 million and has grossed over $37 million domestically.  “Risen” has grossed over $36 million on a budget of $20 million. “God’s Not Dead,” whose sequel “God’s Not Dead 2” will be released April 1, made over $60 million domestically on a $2 million budget. And a remake of "Ben-Hur" is scheduled for release this August.

Walters reports that part of the key to a successful faith-based film is to have a reasonable budget and to not stray too far from the Biblical source. Ridley Scott’s 2014 “Gods and Kings” failed to recoup even half of its $140 budget, and Darren Aronofsky’s “Noah” was protested for taking liberties with the original story.

“The studio heads aren’t really interested in this market, nor do they really know it,” David A.R. White, the co-founder of the “Christ-centered” movie production company Pure Flix Entertainment, told Walters. “So they’re thinking, we’re spending a hundred million, so let’s try to make it a crossover movie –a disaster epic. Let’s do the least amount that we have to do to gather the faith audience, because they’re stupid; they’ll come to anything that has a Bible in it. But the problem is, the faith audience isn’t stupid. They’ve been treated by Hollywood for years and years as if they are, and they’re tired of that."

The Bloomberg story concludes:

A dozen years after the post-Passion boom, Hollywood is starting to learn from the sins of the past, scaling back gluttonous budgets and vowing not to bear false witness in production and promotion. “Studios like Sony have seen that these movies are low-cost, and, if marketed correctly, they can be very profitable,” says Matthew Belloni, executive editor of the Hollywood Reporter. “It’s hit-and-miss, but the downside isn’t big. If one thing works, everyone will try to copy it.”

SOURCE





Setting the Record Straight: North Carolina Law Protects Everyone’s Bodily Privacy

The Charlotte City Council passed an ordinance Feb. 22 that was a direct attack on the long-acknowledged truth that maintaining sex-specific bathroom facilities preserves the privacy and safety of women and girls. If enacted, this ordinance would have allowed men to choose—based on feelings rather than biological facts—to enter restrooms reserved for women and girls.

Recognizing the inherent dangers created by Charlotte’s ordinance, the North Carolina General Assembly and Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, acted swiftly and appropriately to pass the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act (“Privacy Act”) to rectify Charlotte’s failure to protect its citizens. The Privacy Act restored fundamental privacy norms to bathrooms in government and public school facilities. It also protects against future attempts to erode the fundamental right to privacy in other venues throughout the state.

And for good reason. Public restrooms are places where women and girls may shower, change their clothes, handle personal grooming issues, and take care of many other private matters unique to females. Many people are uncomfortable merely discussing these topics, so imagine the discomfort when women have to do such activities with males present. Women and girls shouldn’t be forced to conduct these private activities in a confined space with male strangers present.

Consider especially that girls and women who have been sexually abused will suffer the additional trauma of being compelled to engage in their most intimate activities in the immediate company of male strangers. No one is saying that every man who struggles with sexual identity issues is a predator. No one. But the mere presence of men in what should be a private, safe space like a bathroom can trigger serious psychological and emotional trauma for women and girls who have been sexually abused. That is simply unacceptable.

This is why the recent uproar—especially the dishonesty of those advocating that men have access to girls’ locker rooms—surrounding the Privacy Act is nothing short of shocking. The companies threatening to boycott North Carolina based on the Privacy Act are really protesting the right of young girls to enjoy privacy and security.

The fact that the NBA is publicly opposing a commonsense privacy law, choosing instead to support policies that force women and young girls to undress and shower in the presence of men, is both unreasonable and unsafe. Such groups are seeking to transform our culture into a genderless society in which objective standards of truth and biological reality are made subservient to political correctness and relativistic self-definitions.

If the right to privacy means anything, it certainly means that women and girls should not be compelled to undress, shower, or use the restroom in the presence of men. The Privacy Act correctly recognizes the compelling interest the state of North Carolina has in protecting the safety and privacy of citizens, especially women and girls, in the intimate context of restroom facilities.

Thankfully, the North Carolina General Assembly and Gov. McCrory have rejected these misguided notions of open-mindedness and tolerance that are fueling social experimentation with mixed-sex restroom policies.

Their commitment to common sense became even more important this week, when the ACLU and other opponents of privacy filed a baseless lawsuit that aims to deprive North Carolinians of their will as expressed through their elected representatives. Contrary to the ACLU’s lawsuit filed this week, the Privacy Act ensures that everyone has equal access to bathrooms based on biological sex, while also offering accommodations for those with special circumstances.

Keeping men out of girls’ and women’s bathrooms should not be a polarizing issue. Privacy is a universal value that every human is entitled to and that lawmakers in North Carolina rightly recognized by exercising common sense and protecting the privacy of women and girls.

SOURCE






Refugee Council accuses Australia of 'cherry picking' Syrian refugees for resettlement

I certainly hope that Australia is cherry-picking.  We want refugees who will fit in well to Australia and there is no doubt that Christians will do that much more readily than Muslims

The Refugee Council has accused Australian immigration officials of "cherry picking" Middle Eastern refugees to be resettled in Australia.

"I don't think anyone expected that the program would be weighted as strongly towards Iraqi Christians as it now appears," Paul Power, the council's CEO, told 7.30.

"No-one can argue that those who are getting resettlement to Australia need resettlement.

"But there are millions of refugees in the middle east in need of resettlement and for Australia to cherry pick people from perhaps 1 to 3 per cent of the refugee population in countries such as Jordan and Lebanon really doesn't reflect at all well on Australia."

Mr Power said it was wrong to respond to the Syrian refugee crisis with a program that prioritises persecuted minorities, when the vast majority of Syria's nearly 5 million refugees are Muslim — many who have suffered their own persecution at the hands of the Assad regime and Shia militias because they are Sunnis.

"It's pretty clear that religious minorities are not the only people who have fled," Mr Power said.

"In fact, the religious minorities are represented in only a small way amongst the refugee populations in Jordan and Lebanon."

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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