PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY RECOGNIZED FOR ONCE

"A jury ruled that a tobacco company was not responsible for the death of a 53-year-old woman who developed lung cancer after four decades of smoking. The jury rejected claims by the woman's daughters Thursday that Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. did not provide their mother, Stella Hale, with adequate warnings of the risks of smoking. Hale, who died in August 2001, smoked Brown & Williamson's Kool cigarettes for about 40 years, according to the suit.

The company, which merged with R.J. Reynolds in July to form the nation's second-largest tobacco company, said that Hale knew the potential health risks of smoking and chose to smoke anyway. Jeff Raborn, lawyer for the newly named Reynolds Tobacco Co., said the ruling "underscores the strength of our defenses in these individual cases." "

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NO FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN SWEDEN

Sweden's anti-hate speech laws have run amok, leading to a very worrying series of convictions-and non-convictions. More categories of people are entering the ranks of the "protected classes"-and recent cases have made it clear that these laws will not be enforced even-handedly. No prize for guessing who is protected and who is not.

Needless to say, Swedish laws prohibiting "hate speech" against racial minorities have been vigorously enforced. There have, for example, been a number of gang-rapes of Swedish women by Muslim immigrants. But Swedes must be careful what they say about them. On May 25, neo-Nazi Bjorn Bjorkqvist was convicted and sentenced to two months in prison for writing, "I don't think I am alone in feeling sick when reading about how Swedish girls are raped by immigrant hordes."

In another recent case, a man living in the Bunkeflo neighborhood of Malmo sent an e-mail message to public officials saying he believed most Arabs were criminals, and that he opposed subsidies for them to move into his neighborhood. "Bunkeflo," he wrote, "was one of the last few refuges in Malmo where you could go out and not see Arabs loitering all around you." This man managed to avoid prison-but had to pay a fine of 10 percent of his pre-tax income. Given Sweden's high taxation rate, this represented a figure of close to 20 percent of his actual income.

But the most spectacular case so far-and one completely ignored by American media-is that of Swedish feminist Joanna Rytel. Earlier this year, she wrote an article called "I Will Never Give Birth to a White Man," for a major Swedish daily, Aftonbladet. Rytel explained why she hates white men-they are selfish, exploitative, vain, and sex-crazed-and just to make things clear, she added, "no white men, please. I just puke on them, thank you very much." She wrote that other than the women's restroom, she can find peace only in the segregated women's prayer room in the mosque in central Stockholm: "At least Muslim men don't mind that women have their own community in peace and quiet." ...

Members of the Swedish National Socialist Front-an admittedly neo-Nazi group-called the article to the attention of the Stockholm authorities. But they refused to indict Miss Rytel. In a letter dated April 19, prosecutor G”ran Lambertz explained why: "The purpose behind the law against incitement of ethnic hatred was to ensure legal protection for minority groups of different compositions and followers of different religions. Cases where people express themselves in a critical or derogatory way about men of ethnic Swedish background were not intended to be included in this law. Because of that, the content in this article cannot be considered incitement of ethnic hatred."...

So now it's official: Swedes can go to jail if they say rude things about the foreigners whom they have generously allowed into their country. But foreigners and anyone else may say whatever they like about Swedes.

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