Sunday, February 07, 2016



Multicultural care home boss is the first in England to be jailed for corporate manslaughter after widow, 86, died weighing less than four stone



A negligent nursing home boss has become the first person in England to be jailed for corporate manslaughter in a care home after an 86-year-old resident died weighing less than four stone.

Widow Ivy Atkin, who suffered from dementia, died at Autumn Grange Care Home on November 22, 2012, after being left lying in her own urine with a rotting bed sore.

The retired dressmaker was found barely alive upstairs, weighing just 3st 5lbs, having lost half her body weight during her 48-day stay and described as being 'skeletal'.

She was rushed to hospital but later died from lower lobe pneumonia and debility, and a lower body mass index.

Yousaf Khan, 47, became the first person to be jailed for corporate manslaughter in a care home when he appeared at Nottingham Crown Court.

He was sentenced to three years and two months after he admitted manslaughter by gross negligence at an earlier hearing.

Khan, of Bulwell, Nottingham, also admitted breaching health and safety regulations in his role as director between September 17 and November 5, 2012.

Officials launched an investigation into the care home in Sherwood Rise, Nottingham, after a 19-year-old carer blew the whistle on the horrific conditions after just three days.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) and the police were called to investigate in November 2012 and discovered residents lying in urine-soaked mattresses.

They also found residents had no hot water or incontinence pads and staff had dressed them in other people's clothing.

A damning CQC report found 'multiple examples of neglectful care' and 28 residents had to be immediately rehoused.

Patients were found dirty and thirsty and scores of ambulances were seen moving patients in the middle of the night and taking them to alternative accommodation.

The Liberal Democrat Care Services Minister Norman Lamb branded the situation 'shocking' and 'wholly unacceptable'.

The residential facility had room for 52 patients and catered for residents over the age of 65 with dementia before it was closed down.

Prosecutor Jason Pitter said: 'The victim was lying in a bed covered in urine in a position that was obviously uncomfortable and inappropriate. 'Her skin and clothes were also covered in urine. 'She had a grade four pressure wound on her lower back - the worst of its kind. In simple terms the flesh had rotted away in that area.

'The failures were so obvious by the time of the final inspection that they did not need to be pointed out.'

The court heard Mrs Atkin moved to Autumn Grange in the summer of 2012 when she became unable to cope in the bungalow where she had lived for more than 50 years.

Her husband, Kenneth, worked in a lemonade factory before his death six years ago. The couple had no children.

Elyas Patel, defending, said: 'The conditions that Mrs Atkin was left in would cause anyone with a nano-gram of humanity to hang their head in sorrow and shame. 'Mr Khan knows, expects, and indeed, wants to be punished for all he has done.  'He apologises unreservedly.'

Speaking after the case, lead officer Detective Superintendent Rob Griffin from Nottinghamshire Police said: 'When she was rescued she weighed less than four stone.

'She was emaciated and dehydrated and she had the most horrific pressure sore on her lower back, which was symptomatic of there being no pressure sore management in that home whatsoever.

'Because had there been it would have been detected and treated long before, and the pathologist was of the view that the pressure sore contributed to Ivy's death.'

Sherwood Rise Ltd was fined £300,000 after they admitted corporate manslaughter and health and safety failures.

Nursing home manager Mohammed Rahamatullah Khan, 38, of Mapperley Park, Nottingham, was sentenced to one year in prison, suspended for two years, after he admitted a health and safety offence between September 17 and November 5, 2012.

In a statement following the case, Mrs Atkin's family said: 'Ivy was a feisty person who was adamant that she didn't want to leave her own home but once it became clear that she was suffering dementia and after a short spell in hospital, the decision was made to place her in Autumn Grange.

'When she left hospital she was still quite alert and able to get around slowly with the help of a walking frame.

'After believing that Ivy was going to be well cared for in the home, it was a huge shock to see how quickly she deteriorated in such a short period of time.

'We believe Ivy's life was shortened by the terrible care she received at Autumn Grange which resulted in her suffering a most undignified end to her life.'

SOURCE






German Cabinet approves measures tightening asylum rules

The German Cabinet took significant steps Wednesday toward toughening asylum rules after assaults in Cologne, approving among other measures a two-year ban on family reunifications and excluding three North African countries from its asylum list.

The steps came a week after the Cabinet moved to make it easier to deport migrants who commit crimes, deepening a new and harsher line by the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has come under mounting criticism for her asylum policies.

The measures approved Wednesday, which also included a plan to house asylum seekers in special facilities to speed their applications, must be submitted to Parliament, where they seem certain to pass.

The steps were clearly intended to make Germany less welcoming for migrants, and to blunt opponents of Merkel’s decision to throw open the doors to about 1 million asylum seekers last year.

Other measures approved by the Cabinet included demanding small contributions from asylum seekers — $11 from their monthly stipends — to help cover the costs of integration courses.

In addition, deportees who are sick and have previously claimed that they must stay in Germany for medical care will have to leave if health care in their home countries is deemed sufficient.

The Cabinet also designated Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria as safe states, meaning those who have arrived from the three North African countries now face deportation.

The push against allowing citizens of those countries to stay has gained momentum since the New Year’s Eve assaults in Cologne by men largely described as Arab or North African in appearance. The police in Cologne and nearby Duesseldorf have also raided North African communities in the two cities in a crackdown on crime.

Since the assaults, Merkel has promised a “palpable reduction” in the number of migrants arriving. But she has refused to bow to demands from her own conservative camp to set a cap in 2016. Instead, she has accelerated diplomacy in Europe and several measures at home to try to curb the influx.

Germany continues — with little success so far — to ask EU partners to help redistribute refugees across the 28 member states, and is pushing to secure a deal with Turkey that would curb the number of migrants crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece.

Elections loom in three of Germany’s 16 states in mid-March, lending extra urgency to the quest to reduce the refugee flow. Opinion polls uniformly predict that an anti-immigrant, right-wing party, the Alternative for Germany, will enter all three state parliaments.

Asked for figures on how many refugees would be affected by the two-year ban on family reunifications, which was first proposed in November, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière declined to specify, but noted that it would not apply to those seeking asylum because of targeted persecution.

The government will also continue to issue entry permits to relatives, almost all Syrians, waiting in the overcrowded refugee camps of Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan.

De Maizière, who has just returned from a two-day trip to Afghanistan to try to reduce the flow of migrants from there, said he would travel soon to Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia to negotiate the return of those countries’ citizens. The minister said more measures would be needed to reduce the influx of migrants, but cited the package approved Wednesday as evidence of the government’s resolve to keep working toward its goals.

The number of Algerians seeking asylum increased to almost 2,300 in December from 840 in June, and applicants from Morocco went to 2,896 from 368, according to the German authorities.

The number of Afghan applicants last year hovered around 150,000, second only to the number of Syrians seeking asylum here.

De Maizière said Afghanistan — where German soldiers are still deployed and German police are training Afghan forces — could not be considered a safe country.

SOURCE






The Failure of Multiculturalism

Just as radar warns of approaching storms, so does the flood of migrants entering Europe warn us of a deluge yet to come, not only for Europeans, if they continue to allow unrestricted immigration, but for the United States.

Reports that women in Cologne, Germany, have been groped and robbed by men described by authorities as having “a North African or Arabic” appearance should be warning enough, but there are other and more ominous warnings that suggest worse lies ahead, unless the problem receives immediate attention and action. And it’s not just Cologne.

The Gatestone Institute, a nonpartisan, not-for-profit international policy council and think tank, is in possession of what it describes as a “leaked German intelligence document,” which says, “We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law.”

Last October, reports Gatestone, Andrew Parker, the director general of Britain’s Security Service, said that “‘the scale and tempo’ of the danger to the UK is now at a level he has not seen in his 32-year career. British police are monitoring over 3,000 homegrown Islamist extremists willing to carry out attacks on the UK.”

On Wednesday, President Obama visited a Baltimore mosque. According to The Daily Caller, the mosque “has deep ties to extremist elements, including the Muslim Brotherhood.” That mosque is not alone, as a map on the paper’s website reveals.

Explaining the president’s visit, White House spokesman Keith Maley said, “The president believes that one of our nation’s greatest strengths is our rich diversity.”

I doubt terrorists believe that. I don’t believe that diversity, as practiced in America, exists in any country with a Muslim majority.

Benedicte Bjornland, head of the Norwegian Police Security Service, recently warned against further Muslim immigration. When U.S. politicians suggest a similar approach, they are denounced as “bigots” and “Islamophobes,” but in Norway and Sweden, two of the most liberal nations in Europe that have welcomed Muslim immigrants, that charge will be difficult to make stick.

What we are witnessing is the complete breakdown and failure of multiculturalism. Dictionary.com defines multiculturalism as “the preservation of different cultures or cultural identities within a unified society, as a state or nation.”

That definition contains a glaring contradiction. A society cannot be unified if it preserves different cultures and cultural identities within itself. That’s why our national motto is translated “out of many, one.” To the multiculturalist it appears to be, “Out of one, many.”

History demonstrates that no nation can long survive if it forgets why it exists. Our failure to inculcate American traditions, beliefs and history, even in the native born, not to mention immigrants, is rapidly destroying the country bequeathed to us by our forebears.

Leftists in Europe and the U.S. have promoted multiculturalism, believing that once Muslims experience our freedoms and dedication to equality they will want to be like us. It doesn’t appear to be working and anyone familiar with the Koran and its “kingdom of this world” instructions knows it likely won’t.

European leaders, from Germany’s Angela Merkel, to Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, have deliberately closed their eyes to what they see unfolding in their countries, and in others.

President Obama is doing the same thing with his trip to the Baltimore mosque. Our enemies see our weakness and failure to understand their objectives, which include destroying the West and establishing a worldwide caliphate. This is not top secret information. Not all Muslims are terrorists, to be sure, but large numbers of radical Islamists profess allegiance to the faith and they are more than willing to wreak havoc in pursuit of their goals.

An ancient proverb reminds us: “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

SOURCE






Obama’s ‘diversity’ diktat is a giant gift to lawyers

If you're a white male looking for a job, your search just got harder.

Claiming women aren't getting paid enough, President Obama wants to make it easier to accuse employers of gender discrimination and hit them with class-action lawsuits. A new regulation proposed on Friday will require all employers with 100 or more workers to report how much their workforce is paid, broken down by race and gender.

The rule, slated to go into effect in September 2017, will cause headaches for employers and anyone - man or woman - who works hard and expects to get ahead based on merit. The winners are federal bean counters, class-action lawyers and the Democratic Party, which is playing up the gender "wage gap" as usual during this election year.

Never mind that the gap is largely fiction. Or that Uncle Sam's social engineers are foisting their cookie-cutter vision of a politically correct workplace on employers, denying them the freedom to hire and promote based on merit.

Race and gender discrimination is already against the law. As it should be. But seniority, education and merit often explain salary differences.

That won't be good enough in the future. Employers will have to change their policies to avoid these differences - for example, not preferring the job applicant who has a college degree over the applicant who doesn't, unless the job can be shown to require college skills. The burden is on employers. It's assumed they're discriminating, in other words, and they have to prove they're not.

Jenny Yang, chairwoman of Obama's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, defends the massive fishing expedition, saying, "pay discrimination goes undetected because of a lack of accurate information about what people are paid."

How will this new EEOC reporting affect you? Your employer will have to lump workers into 12 salary bands. If you're a white male up for a raise, but the band above yours already includes too many while males, tough luck. Your boss will be pressured to give the raise to a woman or minority to avoid triggering EEOC scrutiny.

This data collection is a godsend for EEOC regulators looking for targets, and it hands class-action lawyers the statistics they need on a silver platter.

But not every difference in pay is actually caused by discrimination. President Obama parrots the bogus claim that for every dollar men make, women make only 79 cents. This so-called "wage gap" is shoddy statistics. It merely averages what all men in America make, and compares that with what all women make, lumping together all kinds of jobs.

It proves nothing about what women and men earn when they do the same work.

The White House is a perfect example of how meaningless averages are. Women in the Obama White House earn on average only 84 cents for every dollar male staffers earn. Does that make 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a hotbed of discrimination?

Many women choose careers that pay less, like education and social work, instead of engineering or computer science. And valid workplace comparisons need to take into account differences in responsibilities and hours worked. Some women opt for flexible hours and less responsibility midway through their careers in order to balance work and family.

Of course, everyone wants women and minorities to be treated evenhandedly. But Obama and other Democrats are obsessing about a superficial concept of diversity that looks only at a person's gender or race. How about diversity of talents and worldviews?

Tech giants in Silicon Valley like Facebook and Google are facing enormous pressure to diversify because they have too many whites and Asians in top jobs. At next week's Super Bowl, can we expect complaints that because the Denver Broncos are 72 percent black, they need to add more whites and Asians to the team?

Americans are fed up with pigeonholing people by their appearance. Whatever happened to rewarding individuals for excellence?

That won't be good enough in the future. Employers will have to change their policies to avoid these differences - for example, not preferring the job applicant who has a college degree over the applicant who doesn't, unless the job can be shown to require college skills. The burden is on employers. It's assumed they're discriminating, in other words, and they have to prove they're not.

Jenny Yang, chairwoman of Obama's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, defends the massive fishing expedition, saying, "pay discrimination goes undetected because of a lack of accurate information about what people are paid."

How will this new EEOC reporting affect you? Your employer will have to lump workers into 12 salary bands. If you're a white male up for a raise, but the band above yours already includes too many while males, tough luck. Your boss will be pressured to give the raise to a woman or minority to avoid triggering EEOC scrutiny.

This data collection is a godsend for EEOC regulators looking for targets, and it hands class-action lawyers the statistics they need on a silver platter.

But not every difference in pay is actually caused by discrimination. President Obama parrots the bogus claim that for every dollar men make, women make only 79 cents. This so-called "wage gap" is shoddy statistics. It merely averages what all men in America make, and compares that with what all women make, lumping together all kinds of jobs.

It proves nothing about what women and men earn when they do the same work.

The White House is a perfect example of how meaningless averages are. Women in the Obama White House earn on average only 84 cents for every dollar male staffers earn. Does that make 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a hotbed of discrimination?

Many women choose careers that pay less, like education and social work, instead of engineering or computer science. And valid workplace comparisons need to take into account differences in responsibilities and hours worked. Some women opt for flexible hours and less responsibility midway through their careers in order to balance work and family.

Of course, everyone wants women and minorities to be treated evenhandedly. But Obama and other Democrats are obsessing about a superficial concept of diversity that looks only at a person's gender or race. How about diversity of talents and worldviews?

Tech giants in Silicon Valley like Facebook and Google are facing enormous pressure to diversify because they have too many whites and Asians in top jobs. At next week's Super Bowl, can we expect complaints that because the Denver Broncos are 72 percent black, they need to add more whites and Asians to the team?

Americans are fed up with pigeonholing people by their appearance. Whatever happened to rewarding individuals for excellence?

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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