Doctors may not forcibly abort the baby of a disabled British woman, appeal court judges have ruled

I understand the thinking behind the order to abort but the question is whether any court should have that power.  I think not. It is an outrage

Today three appeal court judges overturned a decision by Mrs Justice Nathalie Lieven, 55, that doctors should perform an abortion on the woman against her will.

The appeal was brought by the unnamed woman's mother, who is a Nigerian Catholic and a former midwife.

Lord Justice McCombe, Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Peter Jackson considered the challenge to Lieven's ruling at a Court of Appeal hearing in London today, according to Press Association.

They said they would give reasons for their decision at a later date.

The new ruling follows days of protest as even some pro-abortion advocates reeled at the idea of the British state forcing a woman to undergo an abortion against her wishes.

On Friday, doctors petitioned the Court of Protection, a legal measure for making decisions on behalf of people believed mentally incapable of them, for permission to perform an abortion on the disabled woman, a black Briton of Nigerian descent, who is said to have the understanding of a ten-year-old child. Mrs Justice Nathalie Lieven, QC, agreed with the doctors that the woman's unborn child should be killed even though the woman did not want to undergo the procedure. 

Lieven, who was revealed in a recent article by UK-based Nigerian pro-life activist to have worked for years on behalf of the British abortion lobby, admitted that forced abortion was "an intrusion."

"I am acutely conscious of the fact that for the State to order a woman to have a termination where it appears that she doesn't want it is an immense intrusion," Lieven said. 

"I have to operate in (her) best interests, not on society's views of termination."

Lieven, the descendent of Baltic German nobility and a member of a highly accomplished German-British family of academics and journalists, dismissed the wishes of the pregnant woman, saying, "I think she would like to have a baby in the same way she would like to have a nice doll."

The woman is twenty-two weeks pregnant, but Lieven said she believed the woman would suffer more if her baby was taken away than if she underwent an abortion. The judge suggested that the baby wasn't yet "a real baby."

"I think (she) would suffer greater trauma from having a baby removed," Lieven stated. "It would at that stage be a real baby."

"Pregnancy, although real to her, doesn't have a baby outside her body she can touch," she said.

A 22-week old unborn baby is roughly the size of a coconut.

Not only do the pregnant woman and her mother oppose the abortion, the social worker caring for her disagreed that an abortion "was in her best interests." According to the Society for the Protection of Children (SPUC), her legal team said that there was "no proper evidence" to show that this was the case. 

The mother of the pregnant woman has stated that she is willing to care for her daughter, who is in her twenties, and her grandchild, but Lieven doubted she was capable of it.

SOURCE  





Senator blasts `politically correct CEOs,' `cultural elites' for imposing abortion extremism

Earlier today, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton skewered "billion-dollar corporations" that "wield their economic power as a weapon to punish the American people for daring to challenge their pro-abortion extremism."

The Arkansas Republican devoted a speech on the U.S. Senate floor to criticizing the CEOs of hundreds of companies for their loud criticism of states that have passed laws strengthening protections for preborn humans.

"These reforms are the work of the pro-life movement, which fights for the most vulnerable among us every day," said Cotton. "The pro-life movement seeks to change the laws of our country in the noblest traditions of our country, working within our democratic system so that our laws ultimately live up to our highest principle: That `all men are created equal,' in the words of our Declaration. That all have a basic right to life."

"Politically correct CEOs shouldn't be in the business of threatening normal Americans," he continued. "But that's exactly what we've seen lately."

The senator noted that "cultural elites" and large corporations are hoping to damage the economies of states whose legislatures have passed pro-life laws, naming Disney, Netflix, and Warner Media as examples.

"And just last Monday, the New York Times ran a full-page advertisement organized by the pro-abortion lobby and signed by the CEOs of hundreds of companies saying that legal protections for unborn babies are `bad for business.' How disgusting is that?" asked Cotton. "Caring for a little baby is `bad for business.'"

"Now, I get why outfits like Planned Parenthood or NARAL would say babies are `bad for business.' Abortion is their business, after all, and they're just protecting [their] market share."

Cotton went on to make a point Tucker Carlson has frequently emphasized on his nightly television show.

"But what about those other CEOs? Why do they think babies are `bad for business'? Perhaps because they want their workers to focus single-mindedly on working - not building a family and raising children," he suggested. "All these politically correct CEOs want company men and women, not family men and women. They'll support your individuality and self-expression just so long as you stay unattached and on the clock."

The company &Pizza, whose CEO signed the pro-abortion New York Times ad, is a "perfect example" of this mindset, said Cotton. "&Pizza doesn't even offer paid maternity leave to its employees - but it does celebrate their `oneness' and `individuality.' It'll even pay employees to get a tattoo of the company logo. So if you want to be a walking billboard for your employer, &Pizza will foot the bill. But if you're pregnant with a child, tough luck."

"As liberal activists have lost control of the judiciary, they've turned to a different hub of power to impose their views on the rest of the country," lamented Cotton. "This time it's private power, located in a few mega-cities on the coasts."

These coastal companies, along with a handful of foreign ones, are "hoping to rule the rest of us like colonies in the hinterlands."

SOURCE  






`I can't be naive anymore': Targeted by arson fires, Mass. rabbis face anti-Semitism at home

ARLINGTON - Luna Bukiet smelled smoke first. It was late, sometime after 10 p.m on Saturday, May 11, the end of Shabbat. The kids were asleep. Her husband, Rabbi Avi Bukiet, was studying in his office. Luna was reading a novel on the living room couch.

Avi, Luna asked, do you smell that? A neighborhood bonfire, perhaps? Or a nearby barbecue? Nothing to worry about. Luna headed upstairs to bed.

Nearly an hour later, the fire alarm shrieked. Avi ran out of the office. Luna woke the kids and hurried them into the car. Tendrils of dusky smoke were creeping through the floorboards. The basement was engulfed in a black, impenetrable fog.

Firefighters arrived and quickly identified the source: a 10-foot stretch of shingle siding on the Bukiets' house was aflame.

The Bukiets' house is not just their home; it's the community's only Jewish outreach center and synagogue. They relocated the Chabad Center for Jewish Life Arlington-Belmont to Lake Street two years ago, after it outgrew a small storefront on Massachusetts Avenue. Here, the Bukiets host Sabbath services, Jewish holiday celebrations, and Hebrew classes for about 200 local families.

For Avi and Luna, arson was the last thing on their minds. But it was clear to investigators the fire had started from the outside. Their next-door neighbor had captured black-and-white surveillance footage of a stranger in a hoodie walking across their driveways.

Then, five days later, an arsonist struck the Bukiet home again. That same night, in Needham, another rabbi's Chabad house was set on fire.

The arson fires at the Chabad houses in Arlington and Needham are part of a disturbing trend of anti-Semitic violence across the country. In April, a gunman at the Chabad of Poway synagogue near San Diego killed one person and wounded three others. That rampage occurred exactly six months after a gunman opened fire at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 and wounding six others in what is believed to be the deadliest attack on Jews in US history.

And then there are the insidious everyday acts of anti-Semitism. Last month, a Peabody rabbi said he and another local rabbi were accosted while they were walking down Lowell Street. A man driving past in a pickup truck yelled profane, anti-Semitic slurs at them before hurling a penny out of his window.

The Anti-Defamation League, which tracks anti-Semitic incidents ranging from vandalism and harassment to deadly assaults, recorded 1,879 attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions in 2018, a near-record level, surpassed only by the previous year (1,986 incidents) and 1994 (2,066 incidents). Massachusetts catalogued a record 177 incidents in 2017 and slightly fewer, 144, in 2018, following only the more populous states of California, New York, and New Jersey in reported incidents.

Meanwhile, hate crimes against Jews, according to the FBI's most recent data, jumped 37 percent in 2017 to 938 incidents, up from 684 a year earlier.

"Anti-Semitism has existed for centuries," said Robert Trestan, executive director of the ADL's New England office. "But the difference now is that it's becoming mainstream and I think for some people it's suddenly becoming fashionable and acceptable to target Jews and to do so in a very open and public way."

Federal authorities are leading the investigation into the Arlington and Needham arson fires, probing, among other questions, whether the fires are connected. An FBI spokeswoman declined to answer questions seeking updates on the cases. The state fire marshal, ADL, and Massachusetts chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations have offered a combined $21,000 reward for any information leading to the arrest of the person or people responsible.

At the Chabad Jewish Center in Needham, the fire charred a section of the house's vinyl siding and chewed a gash into the lattice below it. Rabbi Mendy Krinsky, 47, who lives there with his wife, Chanie, 43, and five of their eight children, put out the blaze with a fire extinguisher before emergency workers arrived. "I couldn't believe it. I was shocked," Mendy Krinsky said. "It was very shocking - very, very unsettling."

The arson fires at the Bukiets' home last month were not their first run-ins with anti-Semitism. Within a week of opening their Massachusetts Avenue Chabad center in September 2013, a cutout of a swastika arrived in the mail with no return address. The message was clear: You're not welcome here.

Avi, who is 32, recalled a more ambiguous incident from earlier that summer, when he and Luna, 29, were looking for a place to live in Arlington. As they were driving down a suburban street, Avi rolled down his window and asked a passerby what he thought about the neighborhood. The man, Avi said, glared at him with startling disdain and snarled, "People like you are moving down here."

Did the man look at Avi and see another gentrifier in town? Another millennial snapping up real estate and ratcheting up costs? Or did he see Avi's brown beard and his kippah and think, "outsider?" Avi drove away not knowing.

Although he grew up in neighboring Lexington, Avi is keenly aware of the pervasiveness and destruction anti-Semitism causes globally. In his teenage years, he went to school in a Paris suburb, where, Avi said, he routinely endured name-calling and worse. Once, an attacker shoved him down an escalator at a Paris train station. To ward off another assault, Avi had to defend himself and a friend with pepper spray. Avi has relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust. His grandfather fled Nazi-occupied Poland for Shanghai when he was 15 before settling in the United States.

"I grew up with that feeling of no matter how safe you feel, no matter how much a society embraces you . . . there's going to be that baseless hatred there," Avi said.

Surveys show Jews are the most highly regarded religious group in the country - more popular than Catholics or Protestants - despite representing less than 2 percent of the US adult population. Most Americans are not anti-Semitic, said Leonard Saxe, a social psychologist and Jewish studies professor at Brandeis University, but today's bigots are more emboldened than before.

Saxe pointed to a few factors that may be contributing to this uptick in anti-Semitic behavior: Record wealth inequality, he said, has provoked immense anxiety among struggling Americans and for some, Jews and immigrants are convenient scapegoats. Social media has fueled the dissemination of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. For perpetrators of horrific acts of violence, the 24/7 news cycle is both a megaphone and recruiting tool for their noxious ideology.

Other researchers and civil rights groups lay the blame on President Trump and his inflammatory rhetoric against Muslims and migrants. It's no coincidence, they've argued, that his political rise has corresponded with a spike in reported hate crimes.

"I think the president's behavior has something to do with this," said Matt Boxer, also a Jewish studies professor at Brandeis. "He has effectively signaled to these people who previously have been afraid to act on their bigotry in quite [as] public a manner that it's acceptable to do so."

Boxer cites the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017, during which hordes of mostly white men, protesting plans to remove a Confederate statue, chanted, "Jews will not replace us" and other neo-Nazi slogans. Responding to the rally, President Trump remarked that there were "very fine people on both sides."

Before the arson fires, the Bukiets made a habit of leaving their doors unlocked in keeping with Chabad tradition. Also known as Chabad-Lubavitch, Chabad is a Hasidic movement within Orthodox Judaism that emphasizes unconditional love and acceptance above all. Any Jew seeking help, faith, or charity, they ensured, would feel welcome in their home.

Today, their house is a fortress, outfitted with security cameras and motion detectors that alert Avi and Luna's phones when anyone sets foot on their property. A sign advertising their home security system is prominently displayed on the sidewalk in front of their elegant teal Victorian. Arlington police regularly swing by. Neighbors have volunteered to stay up at night and keep watch. The Bukiets lock their doors.

"I can't be naive anymore," Avi said. "I thought over here [in the United States], it was different and I have to realize, no, it's not different. There's going to be people that are going to treat you ill, and I need to have my eyes wide open."

In Needham, Mendy Krinsky declined to elaborate on his home's security measures for fear of tipping off another potential attacker.

Jeremy Yamin, associate vice president and director of security and operations at Combined Jewish Philanthropies in Boston, said anxiety about the recent surge of anti-Semitic violence here and across the country has spurred more demand among Jewish institutions for stronger security protocols. Rabbis, in particular, Yamin said, are more worried about safety than ever.

Since Nov. 1, CJP has held at least 40 security trainings and seminars for approximately 1,500 people representing dozens of Jewish organizations, including local synagogues and day schools.

"After Pittsburgh, after Poway, after the Chabad arson fires, the phones really haven't stopped ringing," Yamin said. "We have a hard time keeping up with requests for training and assessment."

After the arson fires, the communities of Arlington and Needham rallied around the Bukiet and Krinsky families. The Bukiets held Shabbat services the Saturday after the second arson fire that were so packed the crowd spilled outside. The following Monday, May 20, more than 600 people flooded Arlington Town Hall for a solidarity gathering in support of the Bukiets. Gifts, cards, and flowers turned up by the hundreds on their doorstep. On Lake Street, just about every house still has a sign on the front lawn that says, "Hate has no home here."

The response was similar in Needham. Observant Jews perform a ritual called Havdalah - Hebrew for "separation" - marking the end of Shabbat and the beginning of a new week. The Saturday night following the arson fire, hundreds of neighbors gathered on the Krinskys' front lawn to observe Havdalah with them - singing, praying, and carrying candles.

"The outpouring of love and support, that's the real Needham. Not whoever did this, this attack on us," Mendy Krinsky said. "As bad as the hate was, the love was many, many times more."

SOURCE  






Australia: 'I lost my job and my marriage'. Man says his life's been 'ruined' since a girl, 19, lied about him sexually harassing her as he helped fix her car

"Always believe the woman" feminists say.  They ignore that there are a lot of lying bitches around.  Thankfully, this one is being prosecuted

A Bosnian refugee falsely accused of sexual harassment has set up a GoFundMe page to help him get his life back on track.

Kenan Basic helped Caitlyn Gray, now 20, fix her car for two hours in Bankstown, west Sydney in November.

Gray, who was 19 at the time, lied to police that he demanded sexual favours and lunged at her breasts and crotch when she refused.

Basic found himself charged and locked up in Silverwater maximum security jail for two weeks.

He lost his job and his wife divorced him and he has now launched a fundraising page. On the page, Mr Basic writes: 'Hi my name is Kenan Basic and l been falsely accused and jailed my life has been ruined after I was wrongly accused of indecent assault.

'I lost my job and my marriage.

'After all this happening to me it's really hard to come back on track when l don't know where to start from.

'So I am rising this profile for me if you guys can help me with anything l would extremely appreciate to all of yous (sic) who help me to come back on track of my life.'   

Gray faced Bankstown Local Court on Tuesday and pleaded guilty to lying about her initial accusations.

She said she did it because he had said something to offend her and she wanted him to go to jail. She submitted a written apology to Mr Basic. 

Gray falsely accused Mr Basic - who had spent more than two hours helping fix her car at a western Sydney petrol station after she had a minor collision - of acting inappropriately towards her.

She wrongly claimed Mr Basic had made unwanted advances towards her and subsequently grabbed her breast and vagina as a way of 'payment' for assisting her with the damaged vehicle.

The court heard Gray, who has no prior criminal history, had regularly been seeing a psychologist in November last year - before making the false accusations against Mr Basic.

Her psychologist's clinical notes, counsellor notes, character references and job history was also handed to the court.

Magistrate Glenn Walsh told Gray to ensure she attended Campbelltown Community Corrections office within seven days so that a full sentencing assessment report could be completed.

Gray will reappear in court for sentencing on August 7.

Mr Basic previously said he was grateful to be free after all charges, but was now hesitant to help strangers.

CCTV captured the interaction between the pair, but Gray told police he followed her after she drove away.

Mr Basic admitted he did follow her, but claimed he did so to ensure her car didn't break down again. - not to harass her as she claimed.

Gray later went to Liverpool police station and gave a statement about the ordeal - which resulted in the arrest of Mr Basic on November 23.

Mr Basic was then charged with multiple offences including one count of incite person over the age of 16 to commit an act of indecency and one count of stalk and intimidate intending to cause fear or physical harm.

Five days later police spoke to Gray again after they failed to find any CCTV evidence to comply with her version of events.

Again, Gray continued to lie and insisted she had been telling the truth. When she spoke to police for a third time on November 29 she repeatedly insisted she had been telling the truth.

Shortly after, Gray came clean and admitted she had fabricated the accusations.

'No-one would ever expect that as a Good Samaritan you stop to assist a broken down motorist that then you would subsequently be charged with these serious offences,' Mr Basic's lawyer said.

SOURCE  

*************************

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, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************