Monday, August 01, 2016



Multicultural heart surgeon, 53, 'raped a woman and sexually assaulted at least three others in a series of attacks over 13 years'



One of Britain's top heart surgeons is accused of raping a woman and sexually assaulting at least three others in a series of attacks over 13 years, a court has heard.

Harley Street surgeon Mohamed Amrani, 53, appeared at Hammersmith Magistrates Court on Wednesday charged with 11 offences, including one count of rape, dating back to 2001, with the most recent taking place in May 2014.

The NHS and private healthcare consultant is accused of one charge of rape, two charge of assault by penetration, six charges of indecent assault and two charges of sexual assault, all on women over 16.

The cardiac surgeon works at the Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust, which is the largest heart and lungs specialist centre in the UK, and based across two sites in central London and Hillingdon, west London.

According to his online profile for the trust, Amrani, who is also registered at the Cardio Vascular Health Clinic on Harley Street, performed the UK's first double valve replacement through a small incision.

He was also part of the team which conducted the first double lung transplant from a non-heart beating donor.

He also works at The BUPA Cromwell Hospital, in South Kensington, where one of the alleged sexual assaults took place.

Court documents revealed there are at least four victims, and all but one of the offences took place at Harefield Hospital in the London borough of Hillingdon.

Moroccan-born Amrani, who is also a senior lecturer in surgery, appeared in the dock wearing glasses, a grey suit with a pink shirt and purple tie, speaking only to confirm his name, date of birth and address.

Amrani, who lives in a £1.7million mansion in Harrow, London, was granted conditional bailed to his home address.

A spokesman for the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust said: 'We are aware that these charges have been brought but this is now a police matter and it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time.

'The General Medical Council has suspended Mr Amrani's licence to practice and he is therefore currently excluded from working at the trust.'

A spokesman for the Cromwell Hospital said: 'We suspended Mr Amrani the moment the police alerted us about their investigation.'

SOURCE





Cognitive ability varies, but prejudice is universal

When it comes to prejudice, it does not matter if you are smart or not, or conservative or liberal, each group has their own specific biases. In a recent study, psychologists show that low cognitive ability (i.e., intelligence, verbal ability) was not a consistent predictor of prejudice. Cognitive ability, whether high or low, only predicts prejudice towards specific groups. The results are published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

"Very few people are immune to expressing prejudice, especially prejudice towards people they disagree with," says lead author Mark Brandt (Tilburg University, Netherlands).

Brandt and Jarrett Crawford (The College of New Jersey) analyzed data from 5914 people in the United States that includes a measure of verbal ability and prejudice towards 24 different groups.

Analyzing the results, the researchers found that people with both relatively higher and lower levels of cognitive ability show approximately equal levels of intergroup bias, but towards different sets of groups. People with low cognitive ability tended to express prejudice towards groups perceived as liberal and unconventional (e.g., atheists, gays and lesbians), as well as groups of people perceived as having low choice over group membership (e.g., ethnic minorities). People with high cognitive ability showed the reverse pattern. They tended to express prejudice towards groups perceived as conservative and conventional (e.g., Christians, the military, big business).

"There are a variety of belief systems and personality traits that people often think protect them from expressing prejudice," says Brandt. "In our prior work we found that people high and low in the personality trait of openness to experience show very consistent links between seeing a group as 'different from us' and expressing prejudice towards that group. The same appears to be true for cognitive ability. "

"Whereas prior work by others found that people with low cognitive ability express more prejudice, we found that this is limited to only some target groups," says Brandt. "For other target groups the relationship was in the opposite direction. For these groups, people with high levels of cognitive ability expressed more prejudice. So, cognitive ability also does not seem to make people immune to expressing prejudice."

The authors would like to see if their findings will replicate in new samples, with new target groups, and additional measures of cognitive ability.

"We used a measure of verbal ability, which is essentially a vocabulary test," says Brandt. "Although this measure correlates pretty well with other measures of cognitive ability it is not a perfect nor a complete measure."

SOURCE






'They shot my son!' ISIS priest-killer's mother wails in the street and insists he was 'not a monster'

She's half right.  She did not give birth to a monster.  It was Islam that made him a monster

The mother of a terrorist Abdel Malik Petitjean reacted with fury today screaming, 'They shot my son, they shot my son' as she struggled to accept his death.

Yamina Petitjean was seen for the first time outside her home since marksmen shot dead her son Abdel Malik.

The 45-year-old wailed: 'I have so much grief. I can't believe what is happening. Why did this happen.'

She spoke as she tried to calm a mob of youths who had gathered on the council estate in the town of Aix Les Bains and had threatened the media.

Petitjean spoke as she emerged from her council flat where he son lived and had planned his terror atrocity.

As she broke down in tears a friend comforted her and led her back to her fifth floor flat.

Friends have said she is in denial about the death of her 19-year-old son.  

SOURCE






Political Correctness is Hurting U.S. National Security

Constitutional lawyer and Iraq War veteran David French said on Wednesday that political correctness is hurting the nation's national security far more than constitutional protections for civil liberties.

“I do think that what does hurt American national security is political correctness,” French told CNSNews.com.  It’s a view of the world not as it is but a view of the world as we want it to be.”

“I think the Constitution strikes the right balance between civil liberties and law enforcement, between liberty and security. I think that what’s hampered us more is political correctness,” French explained.

“We want to believe things that are not true because it makes the world a happier place,” he said.

French does not see the “robust constitutional protections” provided by the Fourth Amendment” as hurting national security. Instead, he told CNSNews.com,  “You can do excellent policing while respecting civil liberty.”

He emphasized that in order to defeat ISIS  both at home and abroad, it is vital to know the enemy.

“We have to understand who the enemy is, where the enemy is coming from, and what the enemy believes, and utilize that knowledge to target the appropriate people for investigation,” he said.  “And I think we could defend our nation on that basis.”

However, even though French warned about the dangers of political correctness and the importance of knowing the enemy, he does not believe that the phrase “radical Islam” is necessarily a useful phrase in combating terrorism.

“Saying ‘radical Islam’ is not a military strategy,” he claimed during a lecture entitled “Fact and Fiction in Fighting ISIS” on Wednesday at the Rayburn House Office Building.

During that lecture, he further explained that the tactics employed against terrorism are far more meaningful than the words used to describe it. In some parts of the Muslim world, he pointed out, terror in the name of Islam is not even a radical thought.

Moreover, he noted that using this phrase might impede the progress of building Arab coalitions to fight terror in the Middle East.

In the interview with CNSNews.com, French also discussed the role of the Second Amendment in relation to domestic terrorism.

“The notion that gun control is an answer to Jihad…would be laugh out loud funny if it weren’t so pitiful,” he said.

Pointing to recent terror attacks in Europe, French explained, “you had more than 100 people killed in a combination of truck attacks, knife attacks, axe attacks, bombings and shootings, with the truck being the most dangerous of all of those things.”

He also referred to the 9/11 terror attacks, saying, “if you look at American casualties to terrorism here domestically, the deadliest weapon so far is a box cutter combined with an airplane.”

“Jihadists can and will find and use whatever weapon they can find and use to kill Americans, to kill Europeans,” he clarified.

However, French does think the Second Amendment can be a “means for us to defend ourselves from jihadists.”

He claimed that if a jihadist was attacking a crowd of people, 99 percent of them “would rather have a chance to confront him.”

“It’s that simple: it’s pure self-defense, which is a constitutional right, it’s a natural right, it’s a human right,” he concluded.

In the lecture earlier in the day, French explained that a comprehensive and lasting strategy is needed in order to defeat ISIS and create stability in the Middle East.

He warned against what he called “terrorist whack-a-mole,” where the United States takes down individual terrorists or groups, only for others to rise up in their place.

According to French, all this does is anger the enemy without creating any lasting strategic effect.

However, he pointed out that even ISIS terrorists have a breaking point and that at a certain point, they will lose hope. They carry out jihad thinking that Allah will lead them to victory, and to defeat them, the U.S. military has to inflict enough damage to convince them that they cannot win,” he said.

French ended the lecture by saying that to defeat ISIS, the United States needs a “permanent,” “aggressive,” and “flexible” strategy of “self-defense.”

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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