Brussels statue of colonial king could be melted and made into memorial for Congo victims, says report

There is no doubt the Belgians were very rough on the Congolese but it may have some relevance that the Congolese are very disordered and criminal to this day

A bronze statue of colonial Belgian king Leopold II in the centre of Brussels could be melted down and turned into a monument to the millions who died under his rule of the Belgian Congo in the 19th century, a group of experts have recommended.

The group, composed of historians, architects and other specialists, also suggested creating an open-air statue park in which the equestrian figure could be displayed in a historical context alongside other controversial memorials.

The regional government of Brussels commissioned the group to write a report on the “decolonisation” of public spaces in the Belgian capital after a backlash against monuments to its colonial past during the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

Protesters targeted the statue of Leopold II, known for his brutal treatment of his colonial subjects.

The notorious monarch ruled what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo as his personal fiefdom for decades in the late 19th century. Experts say his brutal rule left as many as 10 million people dead.

The Belgian state took ownership of the huge territory in central Africa in 1908 and retained power over it until the DRC became an independent nation in 1960.

Brussels is filled with memorials of the Belgian empire that was built in Leopold's reign. Besides a wealth of statues, there are scores of streets, squares and public transport stops named after colonial figures.

The report said that public space in the capital had been shaped by a “one-sided and propagandist perspective” since the empire.

It does not recommend tearing down all statues but suggests a case-by-case approach that consults locals before taking a decision. Some could be renamed or put in context with information plaques.

The streets and public spaces with colonial names should all be renamed, the report said, warning against public consultation due to the controversial outcome of a recent referendum on the name of a Brussels tunnel.

The public voted for the Leopold II tunnel to be renamed after Annie Cordy, a recently deceased singer whose songs were littered with colonial stereotypes.

Pascal Smet, the minister with responsibility for urban planning for the Brussels region, said the report offered a nuanced approach to addressing colonial monuments. “The easiest thing would be to get rid of all the statues, but they didn’t choose that,” he said.

“Of course we all know for the individuals that are living in our city today, nobody is responsible for the colonisation, so there is no question of culpability, but it’s a question of a collective responsibility,” he said.

“I think it very important, especially in the times that we are living now … not to be stuck in history, but to understand history.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/leopold-ii-statue-brussels-belgium-b2019716.html

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Supreme Court agrees to hear case of Christian graphic designer who refused to create websites for same-sex weddings because of her religious beliefs

The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to take up the case of a Christian graphic designer who has refused to create websites for same-sex marriage over her religious beliefs.

Lorie Smith, from Colorado, offers graphic and website design services and wants to expand to wedding website services, but she says her religious beliefs would lead her to decline any request from a same-sex couple to design a wedding website.

She also wants to post a statement on her website about her beliefs, but that would run afoul of a Colorado anti-discrimination law. Smith had argued the law violates her free speech and religious rights.

The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, indicated it would not look at the religious rights issue.

But the high court did say it would decide whether a law that requires an artist to speak or stay silent violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment. The case is expected to be argued in the fall.

In a 2-1 ruling last year, the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied Smith's attempt to overturn a lower court ruling throwing out her legal challenge.

The panel said Colorado had a compelling interest in protecting the 'dignity interests' of members of marginalized groups through its law, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act.

The law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, was previously at the heart of Colorado baker Jack Phillips' case, which was decided in 2018 by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court said at the time that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had acted with anti-religious bias against Phillips after he refused to bake a cake for two men who were getting married.

But it did not rule on the larger issue of whether a business can invoke religious objections to refuse service to LGBTQ people.

Both Smith and Phillips were represented by the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom.

'The government doesn't have the power to silence or compel creative expression under the threat of punishment. It's shocking that the 10th Circuit would permit Colorado to punish artists whose speech isn't in line with state-approved ideology,' said Alliance of Defending Freedom General Counsel Kristen Waggoner, Smith's attorney.

'Colorado has weaponized its law to silence speech it disagrees with, to compel speech it approves of, and to punish anyone who dares to dissent. Colorado's law—and others like it—are a clear and present danger to every American's constitutionally protected freedoms and the very existence of a diverse and free nation.'

Late last year a group of 45 Republican federal lawmakers signed an amicus brief in support of Smith's case getting before the Supreme Court.

Signatories included Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Senate Minority Whip John Thune, and Colorado Reps. Ken Buck and Lauren Boebert.

In the brief they accuse the 10th Circuit Court of using the law to force an act 'conflicting with an individual’s deeply held beliefs.'

They claim, 'an atheist musician could be forced to perform at an evangelical church service. Or a Muslim tattoo artist could be forced to write “My religion is the only true religion” on the body of a Christian.'

'Religious speech holds a uniquely important and protected place in American history and jurisprudence. Ms. Smith and others like her deserve the strongest possible First Amendment protection,' the court filing reads.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10539275/High-court-case-refusal-serve-gay-couples.html

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NYC reforms aimed at tinkering with racial makeup of criminals created more Black victims

Progressive leaders have ushered in criminal justice reforms theoretically intended to rectify the imbalance of Black Americans who are arrested, convicted and incarcerated. But in practice, in cities like New York, these reforms have backfired, resulting in a spike in crime, with more Black Americans victimized and more Black Americans incarcerated, according to experts.

"A lot of these policies were designed explicitly around the idea that Blacks are so disproportionately represented in the people who are arrested and the people who are prosecuted and convicted and incarcerated — and trying to design criminal justice policy to back-engineer that number to be more on par with the racial demographics of everybody of society," Hannah E. Meyers, director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News Digital in a phone interview Monday. "That in itself has created a bigger problem."

Meyers and Jim Quinn, a former executive district attorney in the Queens district attorney’s office, recently published an essay in the New York Times arguing that by "aiming for racial equity in criminal justice rather than focusing solely on deterring and responding to crime, policymakers seem to have neglected the foundational purpose of law and order."

"What has followed — a sharp rise in victims of crime, who remain disproportionately Black, and a slight increase in the percentage of Rikers Island inmates who are Black — is a racial imbalance of a more troubling kind," the authors wrote in the article.

New York City is grappling with skyrocketing crime. Murders went up 52% from 2019 to 2021, while shootings were up 104% and car theft 91%. In 2020, Black New Yorkers were victims in 65% of murders and 74% of shootings, the authors of the NYT essay wrote.

In New York, policing and incarceration policies have been at the forefront of debate and such policies took effect as Black Lives Matter protests and the defund the police movement hit a fever pitch in 2020.

Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2017 supported releasing thousands of inmates at Rikers Island through the city’s "supervised release" program. In 2019, New York lawmakers passed sweeping changes to the state's bail laws that restrict crimes where judges can set bail. Also, in 2019, New York passed discovery reform, which required prosecutors to disclose their evidence to the defense earlier in case proceedings.

"I think you could talk to any prosecutor, especially any line prosecutor or anyone that's recently left a DAs office in a more senior role, and they will tell you … that discovery reform is having an enormous impact on crime," Meyers told Fox News Digital in a phone interview Monday.

The reforms were put in place as former Mayor Bill de Blasio moved to defund the police, which brought with it the end of the NYPD’s plainclothes unit and reassigning officers.

Meyers and Quinn wrote that such reforms are "harming Black New Yorkers" and they pointed to increasing crime levels in largely Black neighborhoods of NYC.

"In the police precinct that covers most of the Brownsville neighborhood as well as adjacent Ocean Hill, where around three-quarters of the residents are Black, shootings at the end of last year were up 144 percent, and murders were up 91 percent from two years earlier," they wrote.

Meyers said that "clearly there are issues we should be talking about, about why there's so much more criminality" in minority communities, but "you have to look upstream."

"You can't fix them necessarily by changing who you arrest or who you incarcerate. That's a colorblind system. That's not where you can insert the … do-gooder fixing of it," Meyers told Fox News Digital.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/new-york-city-reforms-race-created-more-problems-expert

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Nearly one-third of NYC bus riders aren’t paying the fare

Nearly 30 percent of NYC bus riders aren’t paying their fare — costing the transit authority $56 million in the last three months of 2021 alone, according to the MTA’s latest fare evasion survey.

Transit number-crunchers estimated some 29.3 percent of riders on local bus routes did not pay the fare in the final three months of 2021 — up from 25.2 percent in the three months before that, the report showed.

The troubling spike brings the reported local bus fare evasion to the highest it’s been in at least a decade, according to a source familiar with the agency’s survey methodology.

“The high rate is mostly being driven by [an approximately] 50 percent non-payment rate in the Bronx, and a jump in non-payment on Staten Island,” the source said.

Transit coffers lost more funding to bus fare evasion in the final quarter of 2021 than from subway fare beaters. Even though there are nearly three-times as many subway riders as bus riders, the evasion rate underground was below 8 percent over the same period, costing the authority $41 million.

“if you can get away with not paying your fare on the bus, chances are you’ll also try it on subways,” warned MTA board member Andrew Albert. “We’re talking about massive fare loss on buses, which hurts the people who need it the most — the poor and those who cannot afford massive fare increases.”

MTA leaders have been sounding the alarm about fare evasion since 2017, but with little success. An audit last year by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli noted that farebeating had actually increased since the $24 million-per-year enforcement effort began.

Two of the city’s five district attorneys, in Manhattan and Brooklyn, stopped prosecuting transit “theft-of-services” in 2018.

The NYPD however still gives tickets for the violation on subways — some 14,573 in the fourth quarter of 2021 — and occasionally makes arrests. Bus enforcement, however, is non-existent; the Transit Bureau did not issue a single bus fare evasion summons in all of 2021, according to publicly available stats.

https://nypost.com/2022/02/21/nearly-one-third-of-nyc-bus-riders-arent-paying-the-fare/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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