Positive News from the USA

[member_28638]

UN to US: Stop racism, police brutality

Aug 29, 2014

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has called on the United States to stop racism and police brutality.

"The excessive use of force by law enforcement officials against racial and ethnic minorities is an ongoing issue of concern, particularly in light of the shooting of Michael Brown," Noureddine Amir, CERD committee vice chairman, said on Friday.

"This is not an isolated event," he added.

The UN watchdog was referring to 18-year-old black teenager Michael Brown who was shot dead by white police officer Darren Wilson in Missouri on August 9.

"It illustrates a big problem in the United States, such as racial bias among law enforcement officials, the lack of proper implementation of rules and regulations governing the use of force, and the inadequacy of training of law enforcement officials," Amir told reporters.

The unarmed teenager was shot at least six times. Brown’s killing caused violent protests in Ferguson and heavily-armed law enforcement officers cracked down protesters.

A grand jury in St Louis is tasked with deciding whether to bring charges against Wilson, who is on paid leave.

"The United States must ensure that every case of excessive use of force is promptly and effectively investigated and the alleged perpetrators prosecuted and the victims or their families are adequately compensated," the UN watchdog said.

"It should undertake complete and comprehensive measures to address the root causes and avoid any future recurrence of such tragic incidents," he added.

The killing of black people in the US stoked outrage over racial profiling and lax US gun laws.

In 2012, the killings of unarmed 17-year-olds Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis also sparked demonstrations.

"The United States government should take effective measures to protect the lives of all individuals and to reduce armed violence," Amir said.

[member_28638]

‘US cop raped, abused 8 black women’

Aug 30, 2014

An Oklahoma City police officer in the United States is facing sixteen criminal charges, including rape and sexual battery for a spree of assaults.

The authorities claim that 27-year-old Daniel Holtzclaw, who was arrested on August 21, raped or sexually abused at least eight black women while on duty in a span of six months.

On Friday, prosecutors charged the patrol officer with two counts of first-degree rape, four counts of sexual battery, and several other similar counts.

Police said Holtzclaw's intentions were racially motivated. All of his victims were middle-aged African-American women.

Investigators have said there may be more victims in the case. Holtzclaw's attorney announced on Friday that he maintains his innocence.

According to Oklahoma City police chief Bill Citty, Holtzclaw has been with the department since September 2011.

Citty says investigators started reviewing Holtzclaw’s actions after they received a complaint in June.

"It taints all of us, and the officers know that and they take it very personally," said Citty. "And it angers us that one of our people, one of our officers, that people trust to keep them safe, is doing just the opposite."

Black community leaders have called for a thorough investigation.

[kancha]

‘US cop raped, abused 8 black women’

But Raping that Underage Girl was Just a 'MORAL' Offence! PS: Can I get my job back?

A Kentucky state trooper told a trial board last month that he would like to have his job back after he was fired for having sex with a 15-year-old girl, calling the relationship a “moral mistake.”

[johneeG]

I spent the majority of this summer at Middlebury College, studying at l’École Française. I had never been to Vermont. I have not been many places at all. I did not have an adult passport until I was 37 years old. Sometimes I regret this. And then sometimes not. Learning to travel when you’re older allows you to be young again, to touch the childlike amazement that is so often dulled away by adult things. In the past year, I have seen more of the world than at any point before, and thus, I have been filled with that juvenile feeling more times then I can count—at a train station in Strasbourg, in an old Parisian bookstore, on a wide avenue in Lawndale. It was no different in Vermont where the green mountains loomed like giants. I would stare at these mountains out of the back window of the Davis Family Library. I would watch the clouds, which, before the rain, drooped over the mountains like lampshades, and I would wonder what, precisely, I had been doing with my life.

I was there to improve my French. My study consisted of four hours of class work and four hours of homework. I was forbidden from reading, writing, speaking, or hearing English. I watched films in French, tried to read a story in Le Monde each day, listened to RFI and a lot of Barbara and Karim Oullet. At every meal I spoke French, and over the course of the seven weeks I felt myself gradually losing touch with the broader world. This was not a wholly unpleasant feeling. In the moments I had to speak English (calling my wife, interacting with folks in town or at the book store), my mouth felt alien and my ear slightly off.

And there were the latest developments, the likes of which I perceived faintly through the French media. I had some vague sense that King James had done something grand, that the police were killing black men over cigarette sales, that a passenger plane had been shot out the sky, and that powerful people in the world still believed that great problems could be ultimately solved with great armaments. In sum, I knew that very little had changed. And I knew this even with my feeble French eyes, which turned the news of the world into an exercise in impressionism. Everything felt distorted. I understood that things were happening out there, but their size and scope mostly eluded me.

Acquiring a second language is hard. I have been told that it is easier for children, but I am not so sure if this is for reasons of biology or because adults have so much more to learn. Still, it remains true that the vast majority of students at Middlebury were younger than me, and not just younger, but fiercer. My classmates were, in the main, the kind of high-achieving college students who elect to spend their summer vacation taking on eight hours a day of schoolwork. There was no difference in work ethic between us. If I spent more time studying than my classmates, that fact should not be taken as an accolade but as a marker of my inefficiency.
The majority of people I interacted with spoke better, wrote better, read better, and heard better than me. There was no escape from my ineptitude.

They had something over me, and that something was a culture, which is to say a suite of practices so ingrained as to be ritualistic. The scholastic achievers knew how to quickly memorize a poem in a language they did not understand. They knew that recopying a handout a few days before an exam helped them digest the information. They knew to bring a pencil, not a pen, to that exam. They knew that you could (with the professor’s permission) record lectures and take pictures of the blackboard.

This culture of scholastic achievement had not been acquired yesterday. The same set of practices had allowed my classmates to succeed in high school, and had likely been reinforced by other scholastic achievers around them. I am sure many of them had parents who were scholastic high-achievers. This is how social capital reinforces itself and compounds. It is not merely one high achieving child, but a flock of high achieving children, each backed by high-achieving parents. I once talked to a woman who spoke German, English and French and had done so since she was a child. How did this happen, I asked? “Everyone in my world spoke multiple languages,” she explained. “It was just what you did.”

There were five tiers of French students, starting with those who could barely speak a word and scaling upward to those who were pursuing a master’s degree. I was in the second tier, meaning I could order a coffee, recount a story with some difficulty, write a short note (sans verb and gender agreement), and generally understand a French speaker provided he or she talked to me really slowly. The majority of people I interacted with spoke better, wrote better, read better, and heard better than me. There was no escape from my ineptitude. At every waking hour, someone said something to me that I did not understand. At every waking hour, I mangled some poor Frenchman’s lovely language. For the entire summer, I lived by two words: “Désolé, encore.”

Compared with my classmates on the second tier, my test scores were on the lower end. Each week, in my literature class, we were responsible for the recitation of some French poems (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Lamartine) from memory, and each day we had to recite a stanza. This sort of exercise may well be familiar to readers of The Atlantic, but the rituals required to master it were totally new to me. I had never been a high-achieving student. Indeed, during my 15 or so years in school, I was remarkably low-achieving student.

There were years when I failed the majority of my classes. This was not a matter of my being better suited for the liberal arts than sciences. I was an English minor in college. I failed American Literature, British Literature, Humanities, and (voilà) French. The record of failure did not end until I quit college to become a writer. My explanation for this record is unsatisfactory: I simply never saw the point of school. I loved the long process of understanding. In school, I often felt like I was doing something else.

Like many black children in this country, I did not have a culture of scholastic high achievement around me. There were very few adults around me who’d been great students and were subsequently rewarded for their studiousness. The phrase “Ivy League” was an empty abstraction to me. I mostly thought of school as a place one goes so as not to be eventually killed, drugged, or jailed. These observations cannot be disconnected from the country I call home, nor from the government to which I swear fealty.

For most of American history, it has been national policy to plunder the capital accumulated by black people—social or otherwise. It began with the prohibition against reading, proceeded to separate and wholly unequal schools, and continues to this very day in our tacit acceptance of segregation. When building capital, it helps to know the right people. One aim of American policy, historically, has been to insure that the “right people” are rarely black. Segregation then ensures that these rare exceptions are spread thin, and that the rest of us have no access to other “right people.”

And so a white family born into the lower middle class can expect to live around a critical mass of people who are more affluent or worldly and thus see other things, be exposed to other practices and other cultures. A black family with a middle class salary can expect to live around a critical mass of poor people, and mostly see the same things they (and the poor people around them) are working hard to escape. This too compounds.

Now, in America, invocations of culture are mostly an exercise in awarding power an air of legitimacy. You can see this in the recent remarks by the president, where he turned a question about preserving Native American culture into a lecture on how we (blacks and Native Americans) should be more like the Jews and Asian Americans, who refrain from criticizing the intellectuals in their midst of “acting white.” The entire charge rests on shaky social science and the obliteration of history. When Asian Americans and Jewish Americans—on American soil—endure the full brunt of white supremacist assault, perhaps a comparison might be in order.

But probably not. That is because fences are an essential element of human communities. The people who patrol these fences are generally unkind to those they find in violation. The phrase “getting above your raising” is little more than anxious working-class border patrolling. The term “white trash” is little more than anxious ruling-class border patrolling. I am neither an expert in the culture of Jewish Americans nor Asian Americans, but I would be shocked if they too were immune. Some years ago I profiled the rapper Jin. As the first Asian-American rapper to secure a major label contract, he often found himself enduring racist cracks from black rappers abroad and the prodding of fence-patrollers at home. “’Yo, what is this? You really think you’re black, Jin?” he recalled his parents saying. “Bottom line—you’re not black, Jin.’”

Pretending that black people are unique—or more ardent—in their fence-patrolling, and thus more parochial and anti-intellectual, serves to justify the current uses of American power. The American citizen is free to say, “Look at them, they criticize each other for reading!” and then go about his business. In that sense it is little different than raising the myth of “black on black crime” when asked about Ferguson.

I will confess to having very little experience with fence-patrolling, and virtually none with the idea that if you are holding a book, you are “acting white.” The Baltimore of my youth was a place where white people rarely ventured. It would not have occurred to anyone I knew to associate reading with white people because very few of us knew any. And I read everything I could find: A Wrinkle In Time, David Walker’s Appeal, Dragon’s of Autumn Twilight, Seize The Time, Deadly Bugs and Killer Insects, The Web of Spider-Man. I had a full set of Childcraft. I loved the volume Make and Do. I had a full set of World Book encyclopedias. I used to pick up the fat “P” edition, flip to a random page, and read for hours. When I was just 6 years old, my mother took me to the Enoch Pratt Free Library on Garrison Boulevard and enrolled me in a competition to see which child could read the most books. I read 24 that summer, far outdistancing the competition. My mother smiled. The librarian gave me candy. I was very proud.

For carrying books in black neighborhoods, in black schools, around black people, I was called many things—nerd, bright, doofus, Malcolm, Farrakhan, Mandela, sharp, smart, airhead. I was told that my “head was too far in the clouds.” I was told that I was “going to do something one day.” But I was never called white. The people who called me a nerd were black. The people who said I was going to “do something one day” were also black. There was no one else around me, and no one else in America then cared. This was not just true of me, it was true of most black children of that era who were then, and are now, the most segregated group in this country. Segregation meant many of us had to rely on traditions closer to home.

And at home I found a separate culture of intellectual achievement. This is the tradition of Carter G. Woodson, Frederick Douglass, and Malcolm X. It argues for education not simply as credentialism or certification, but as a profound act of auto-liberation. This was the culture of my childhood and it gave me some of the greatest thrills of my youth.

I was a boy haunted by questions: Why do the lilies close at night? Why does my father always say, “I can dig it"? And who really killed the dinosaurs? And why is my life so unlike everything I see on TV? That feeling—the not knowing, the longing for knowing, and the eventual answer—is love and youth to me. And I have always preferred libraries to classrooms because the wide open library is the ultimate venue for this theater. This culture was reinforced by my parents, and the politically conscious parents around me, and their politically conscious children. The culture was so strong that it could be regarded as a kind of social capital. It was so old that it could also be regarded as a legacy. This legacy is more responsible for my presence in these august pages than any other. That is because a good writer must ultimately be an autodidact and take a dim view of credentials. My culture failed to make me into a high-achieving student. It succeeded at making me into a writer.

I have never had much of an urge to brag about this. I have always known that in failing to become a scholastic achiever, I forfeited knowledge of certain things. (A mastery of Augustine comes to mind.) But what I did not understand was that I had also forfeited a culture, which is to say a tool kit, a set of pins and tumblers that might have unlocked the language which I so presently adore.

Scholastic achievement is sometimes demeaned as the useless memorization of facts. I suspect that it has more to offer than this. If you woke my French literature professor at 2 a.m., she could recite the deuxième strophe of Verlaine’s “Il Pleure Dans Mon Coeur.” I suspect this memorization, this holding of the work in her head, allowed her to analyze it and turn it over in ways I could only do with the text in front of me. More directly, there is no real way for an adult to learn French without some amount of memorization. French is a language that obeys its rules when it feels like it. There is no unwavering rule to tell you which nouns are masculine, or which verbs require a preposition. Memory is the only way through.

At Middlebury, I spent as much time as I could with the master’s students, hovering right at the edge of overbearing. On average, I understood 30 percent of what was being said. This was, of course, the point. I wanted to be reminded of who I was. I wanted to be young again, to feel that old thrill of not knowing. It is the same feeling I had as a boy, wondering about the lilies and dinosaurs, listening to “The Bridge Is Over,” wondering where in the world was Queens.

And I was ignorant. I felt as if someone had carried me off at night, taken me out to sea, and set me adrift in a life-raft. And the night was beautiful because it held all the things I would never know, and in that I saw my doom—the time when I could learn no more. Morning, noon, and evening, I sat on the terrace listening to the young master’s students talk. They would recount their days, share their jokes, or pass on their complaints. They came from everywhere—San Francisco, Atlanta, Seattle, Boulder, Hackensack, Philadelphia, Kiev. And they loved all the things I so wanted to love, but had not made time to love—Baudelaire, Balzac, Rimbaud. I would listen and feel the night folding around me, and the ice-water of youth surging through me.

One afternoon, I was walking from lunch feeling battered by the language. I started talking with a young master in training. I told her I was having a tough time. She gave me some encouraging words in French from a famous author. I told her I didn’t understand. She repeated them. I still didn’t understand. She repeated them again. I shook my head, smiled, and walked away mildly frustrated because I understood every word she was saying but could not understand how it fit. It was as though someone had said, “He her walks swim plus that yesterday the fight.” (This is how French often sounds to me.)

The next day, I sat at lunch with her and another young woman. I asked her to spell the quote out for me. I wrote the phrase down. I did not understand. The other young lady explained the function of the pronouns in the sentence. Suddenly I understood—and not just the meaning of the phrase. I understood something about the function of language, why being able to diagram sentences was important, why understanding partitives and collective nouns was important.

In my long voyage through this sea of language, that was my first sighting of land. I now knew how much I didn’t know. The feeling of discovery and understanding that came from this was incredible. It was the first moment when I thought I might survive the sea.

My personal road to this great feeling, to these discoveries, to Middlebury, was not the normal one. I was raised among people skeptical of a canon that had long been skeptical of them. I needed some independent sense of myself, of my cultures and traditions, before I could take a mature look at the West. I wanted nothing to do with Locke because I knew that he wanted little to do with me. I saw no reason to learn French because it was the language of the plunderers of Haiti.

I had to be a nationalist before I could be a humanist. I had to come to understand that black people are not merely the victims of the West, but its architects. The philosophes started the sentence and Martin Luther King finished it. The greatest renditions of this country’s greatest anthems are all sung by black people—Ray, Marvin, Whitney. That is neither biology nor a mistake. It is the necessary cosmopolitanism of a people, viewing America from the basement and thus forced to take their lessons when they get them—absorbing, reinterpreting, refining, creating.

Now it must never be concluded that an urge toward the cosmopolitan, toward true education, will make people stop hitting you. The inverse is more likely. In the early 19th century, the Cherokee Nation was told by the new Americans that if its members adopted their “civilized” ways, they would soon be respected as equals. This promise was deeply embedded in the early 19th century approach to this continents indigenous nations.

“We will never do an unjust act towards you. on the contrary we wish you to live in peace, to increase in numbers, to learn to labor, as we do,” Thomas Jefferson said. “In time you will be as we are; you will become one people with us; your blood will mix with ours; & will spread, with ours, over this great Island. Hold fast then, my Children, the Chain of friendship, which binds us together; & join us in keeping it forever bright & unbroken.”

The Cherokee Nation—likely for their own reasons—embraced mission schools. Some of them converted to Christianity. Other intermarried. Others still enslaved blacks. They adopted a written Constitution, created a script for their language and published a newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix, in English and Cherokee. Thus the Native Americans of that time showed themselves to be as able to to integrate elements of the West with their own culture as any group of Asian or Jewish American. But the wolf has never much cared whether the sheep were cultured or not.

“The problem, from a white point of view,” writes historian Daniel Walker Howe, “was that the success of these efforts to ’civilize the Indians’ had not yielded the expected dividend in land sales. On the contrary, the more literate, prosperous, and politically organized the Cherokees made themselves, the more resolved they became to keep what remained of their land and improve it for their own benefit.”

Cosmopolitanism, openness to other cultures, openness to education did not make the Cherokee pliant to American power; it gave them tools to resist. Realizing this, the United States dropped the veneer of “culture” and “civilization” and resorted to “Indian Removal,” or The Trail of Tears. The plunder was celebrated in a popular song:

All I want in this creation
Is a pretty little wife and a big plantation
Away up yonder in the Cherokee nation.

The Native Americans of this period found that America’s talk of trading culture for rights was just a cover. In our time, it is common to urge young black children toward education so that they may be respectable or impress the “right people.” But the “right people” remain unimpressed, and the credentials of black people, in a country rooted in white supremacy, must necessarily be less. That great powers are in the business of using "respectability" and "education" to ignore these discomfiting facts does not close the book. You can never fully know. But you can walk in the right direction.

The citizen is lost in the labyrinth constructed by his country, when in fact straight is the gate, and narrow must always be the way. When I left for Middlebury, I had just published an article arguing for reparations. People would often ask me what change I expected to come from it. But change had already come. I had gone further down the unending path of knowing, deeper into the night. I was rejecting mental enslavement. I was rejecting the lie.

I came to Middlebury in the spirit of the autodidactic, of auto-liberation, of writing, of Douglass and Malcolm X. I came in ignorance, and found I was more ignorant than I knew. Even there, I was much more comfortable in the library, thumbing through random histories in French, than I was in the classroom. It was not enough. It will not be enough. Sometimes you do need the master’s tools to dismantle his house.


Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.

Link

The Trail of Tears is a name given to the forced relocation of Native American nations from southeastern parts of the United States following the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The removal included many members of the following tribes, who did not wish to assimilate: Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations, among others, from their homelands to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. The Native Americans who chose to stay and assimilate were allowed to become citizens in their states and of the U.S.[1] The phrase "Trail of Tears" originated from a description of the removal of the Choctaw Nation in 1831.[2]

Many Native Americans suffered from exposure, disease and starvation on the route to their destinations. Many died, including 2,000-6,000 of 16,542 relocated Cherokee.[3][4][5] European Americans (both Christians and Jews), and African American freedmen and slaves also participated in the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek and Seminole forced relocations.[6]

In 1830, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole (sometimes collectively referred to as the Five Civilized Tribes) were living as autonomous nations in what would be called the American Deep South. The process of cultural transformation (proposed by George Washington and Henry Knox) was gaining momentum, especially among the Cherokee and Choctaw.[7] Many white settlers had pressured the federal government to move the Indians out of the Southeast; some encroached on Indian lands and others wanted land made available to white settlers. Andrew Jackson helped gain Congressional passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which authorized the government to offer deals in order to extinguish Native American title to lands in the Southeast.

In 1831 the Choctaw were the first to be removed, and they became the model for all other removals. After the Choctaw, many Seminole were removed in 1832 (following two wars, but a small group had moved to the Everglades and were never defeated by the US), the Creek in 1834, the Chickasaw in 1837, and finally the Cherokee in 1838.[8] After removal, some Native Americans remained in their ancient homelands; some Choctaw are found in Mississippi, Seminole in Florida, Creek in Alabama and Florida, and Cherokee in North Carolina. A limited number of non-native Americans (including African Americans, usually as slaves) also accompanied the Native American nations on the trek westward; some were spouses.[8] By 1837, 46,000 Native Americans from these southeastern states had been removed from their homelands, thereby opening 25 million acres (100,000 km2) for predominantly white settlement.[8]

The fixed boundaries of these autonomous tribal nations, comprising large areas of the United States, were subject to continual cession and annexation prior to 1830, in part due to pressure from squatters and the threat of military force in the newly declared U.S. territories—federally administered regions whose boundaries supervened upon the Native treaty claims. As these territories became U.S. states, state governments sought to dissolve the boundaries of the Indian nations within their borders, which were independent of state jurisdiction, and to expropriate the land therein. These pressures were magnified by U.S. population growth and the expansion of slavery in the South with the rapid development of cotton cultivation in the uplands due to the invention of the cotton gin.[9]

Link

Trail of Tears
Main articles: Trail of Tears and Cherokee Removal
Chief John Ross, ca. 1840

During the first decades of the 19th century, Georgia focused on removing the Cherokee's neighbors, the Lower Creek. The Georgia Governor George Troup and his cousin William McIntosh, chief of the Lower Creek, signed the Treaty of Indian Springs (1825), ceding the last Muscogee (Creek) lands claimed by Georgia. The state's northwestern border reached the Chattahoochee, the border of the Cherokee Nation. In 1829, gold was discovered at Dahlonega, on Cherokee land claimed by Georgia. The Georgia Gold Rush was the first in U.S. history, and state officials demanded that the federal government expel the Cherokee. When Andrew Jackson was inaugurated as President in 1829, Georgia gained a strong ally in Washington. In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the forcible relocation of American Indians east of the Mississippi to a new Indian Territory.

Andrew Jackson said the removal policy was an effort to prevent the Cherokee from facing extinction as a people, which he considered the fate that "the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware" had suffered.[41] But, there is ample evidence that the Cherokee were adapting modern farming techniques. A modern analysis shows that the area was in general in a state of economic surplus and could have accommodated both the Cherokee and new settlers.[42]

The Cherokee brought their grievances to a US judicial review that set a precedent in Indian Country. John Ross traveled to Washington, D.C., and won support from National Republican Party leaders Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Samuel Worcester campaigned on behalf of the Cherokee in New England, where their cause was taken up by Ralph Waldo Emerson (see Emerson's 1838 letter to Martin Van Buren). In June 1830, a delegation led by Chief Ross defended Cherokee rights before the U.S. Supreme Court in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia.

In 1831 Georgia militia arrested Samuel Worcester for residing on Indian lands without a state permit, imprisoning him in Milledgeville. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that American Indian nations were "distinct, independent political communities retaining their original natural rights," and entitled to federal protection from the actions of state governments that infringed on their sovereignty.[43] Worcester v. Georgia is considered one of the most important dicta in law dealing with Native Americans.

Jackson ignored the Supreme Court's ruling, as he needed to conciliate Southern sectionalism during the era of the Nullification Crisis. His landslide reelection in 1832 emboldened calls for Cherokee removal. Georgia sold Cherokee lands to its citizens in a Land Lottery, and the state militia occupied New Echota. The Cherokee National Council, led by John Ross, fled to Red Clay, a remote valley north of Georgia's land claim. Ross had the support of Cherokee traditionalists, who could not imagine removal from their ancestral lands.
Cherokee beadwork sampler, made at Dwight Mission, Indian Territory, 19th century, collection of the Oklahoma History Center.

A small group known as the "Ridge Party" or the "Treaty Party" saw relocation as inevitable and believed the Cherokee Nation needed to make the best deal to preserve their rights in Indian Territory. Led by Major Ridge, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot, they represented the Cherokee elite, whose homes, plantations and businesses were confiscated, or under threat of being taken by white squatters with Georgia land-titles. With capital to acquire new lands, they were more inclined to accept relocation. On December 29, 1835, the "Ridge Party" signed the Treaty of New Echota, stipulating terms and conditions for the removal of the Cherokee Nation. In return for their lands, the Cherokee were promised a large tract in the Indian Territory, $5 million, and $300,000 for improvements on their new lands.[44]

John Ross gathered over 15,000 signatures for a petition to the U.S. Senate, insisting that the treaty was invalid because it did not have the support of the majority of the Cherokee people. The Senate passed the Treaty of New Echota by a one-vote margin. It was enacted into law in May 1836.[45]

Two years later President Martin Van Buren ordered 7,000 Federal troops and state militia under General Winfield Scott into Cherokee lands to evict the tribe. Over 16,000 Cherokee were forcibly relocated westward to Indian Territory in 1838–1839, a migration known as the Trail of Tears or in Cherokee ᏅᎾ ᏓᎤᎳ ᏨᏱ or Nvna Daula Tsvyi (The Trail Where They Cried), although it is described by another word Tlo-va-sa (The Removal). Marched over 800 miles (1,300 km) across Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas, the people suffered from disease, exposure and starvation, and as many as 4,000 died.[46] As some Cherokees were slaveholders, they took enslaved African Americans with them west of the Mississippi. Intermarried European Americans and missionaries also walked the Trail of Tears. Ross preserved a vestige of independence by negotiating for the Cherokee to conduct their own removal under U.S. supervision.[47]

In keeping with the tribe's "blood law" that prescribed the death penalty for Cherokee who sold lands, Ross's son arranged the murder of the leaders of the "Treaty Party". On June 22, 1839, a party of twenty-five Ross supporters assassinated Major Ridge, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot. The party included Daniel Colston, John Vann, Archibald, James and Joseph Spear. Boudinot's brother Stand Watie fought and survived that day, escaping to Arkansas.

In 1827, Sequoyah had led a delegation of Old Settlers to Washington, D.C. to negotiate for the exchange of Arkansas land for land in Indian Territory. After the Trail of Tears, he helped mediate divisions between the Old Settlers and the rival factions of the more recent arrivals. In 1839, as President of the Western Cherokee, Sequoyah signed an Act of Union with John Ross that reunited the two groups of the Cherokee Nation.

Link

[ramana]

Les Miserableization of US criminal justice system. In Victor Hugo's book Jena ValJean goes to prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister's children.

In post-modern US, he would have been shot especially if he was colored.

[Singha]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morn ... mm&hpid=z3

the usual sickening tale - white girl murdered, based on 'rumours' two black boys mentally challenged at that picked up and denied due process, made to sign confessions implicating each other, sentenced to death and locked up for 30 years, until a chance contact with a enquiry commission results in DNA evidence proving they were innocent. now set free in the autumn of their lives....

[kancha]

Ah, the tall, short tempered ones!

[Shreeman]

Exhibit A - a study in economies of scale to bring forth improved social services.

[Shreeman]

Exhibit B - the seeds of liberty on foreign shores.

[Shreeman]

Exhibit c - Respect for all life in a deeply religious land.

[Shreeman]

Exhibit d - an authoritative statistic. 20% is a good round number.

[Shreeman]

Exhibit e -- an unbiased, commercial view of the desegregated, racially integrated society.

[pankajs]

Exhibit d - an authoritative statistic. 20% is a good round number.

More shocking statistics

https://rainn.org/statistics
60% of sexual assaults are not reported to the police
97% of rapists will never spend a day in jail

Useful stats to know if you ever get questions on Rape statistics and societal attitude in India from the land of the Free and the home of the Brave.

[pankajs]

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/08/evangel ... nis_homes/

Evangelical megachurch begins closing branches after pastor calls women “penis homes”

According to Pastor Mark Dunford, who was recently laid off from Mars Hill’s Portland branch, his dismissal comes in the wake of calls for Driscoll’s resignation, as well as Dunford’s denouncement of the founder for instilling a “lack of transparency” and “culture of fear” within the church ranks. A recent New York Times profile of Driscoll also reports accusations of “plagiarizing, of inappropriately using church funds and of consolidating power to such a degree that it has become difficult for anyone to challenge or even question him.”

For some time the tide has been turning against Driscoll, who has made a spectacle of himself over the years with his anti-LGBT, anti-woman remarks, many of which he has espoused as key elements of his theology. Preaching theological “complementarianism,” in which women are considered men’s followers and subordinates, Driscoll has expressed a belief that women should always be submissive. According to one report, the pastor once instructed a female congregant to get on her knees and apologize to her husband for failing to bend to his will, then give him a blow job.

The advice fits in with Driscoll’s long-apparent, disturbing view of women, examples of which feminist blogger Libby Anne unearthed and posted on Monday. In a 2001 blog post under the pen name William Wallace II, Driscoll blatantly asserts his patriarchal understanding of women’s role in the world, essentially calling them “penis homes”:

{quote}The first thing to know about your penis is, that despite the way it may see, it is not your penis. Ultimately, God created you and it is his penis. You are simply borrowing it for a while.

While His penis is on loan you must admit that it is sort of just hanging out there very lonely as if it needed a home, sort of like a man wondering the streets looking for a house to live in. Knowing that His penis would need a home, God created a woman to be your wife and when you marry her and look down you will notice that your wife is shaped differently than you and makes a very nice home.{/quote}

Oh, and in case you’re a dude who finds yourself thinking that your hand or maybe another dude would make for a good home, here’s some Driscoll-authored homophobia to counter that thought:

{quote}Therefore, if you are single you must remember that your penis is homeless and needs a home. But, though you may believe your hand is shaped like a home, it is not. And, though women other than your wife may look like a home, to rest there would be breaking into another man’s home. And, if you look at a man it is quite obvious that what a homeless man does not need is another man without a home.{/quote}

[UlanBatori]

BREAKING NEWS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!
Was NFL Commissioner guilty of coverup, or did he jump to conclusions, or did he have his thumb in his ear or was it up his oiseule, and was it OK/NOT OK/ATROCIOUS that professional football "player" Rice, trained to knock down people, used his skills on his fiancee, impressing her so much that she married him and is happily married to him?
IS this hot news or what?

[Shreeman]

Exhibit f - F, the right letter for this exhibit.

[Gus]

they should not have banned him outright..that's like going from 0 to 100 on punishment level. both his and his wife's (the victim) lives are ruined now that he is out of the only job he knows. a one year ban and a proclamation that it will be lifetime ban from now on, would have been better, methinks.

[Shreeman]

they should not have banned him outright..that's like going from 0 to 100 on punishment level. both his and his wife's (the victim) lives are ruined now that he is out of the only job he knows. a one year ban and a proclamation that it will be lifetime ban from now on, would have been better, methinks.

He is a gladiator in the true sense. Everyone on these teams is one. But money is not one of his problems. Nor is his life ruined -- his team won the championship last year and he was one of the stars. These are rich people tantrums, in this case, making equal-equal for all the bad white news coming out of late.

The wife (then not married) had no problem with the fight -- and went on to marry him. This is just attention deflection, costing the Rice couple (wife gets half) several 10s of millions but neither of them is remotely in the normal people problems domain.

The guy who killed a bunch of dogs was similarly punished and came back to play just fine. This guy is a running back, trust me on this, not playing will save a few brain cells and some sanity.

The story here is the non story.

ps -- specially for residents of ulan bator.

[johneeG]

Do Black Celebrities Go To Jail For Tax Evasion More Than Whites?
Comments: 0 | Leave A Comment
May 8, 2013
By The Urban Daily Staff

snipes-cage-tax-split-630-2

Follow @TheUrbanDaily


With news still sinking in about Lauryn Hill’s impending 3 month jail sentence for tax evasion, the question that everyone started asking was, “Who else has been in trouble with the IRS and had to serve time?” While that question on its face was enough to ponder, an even deeper question started to be asked; “How many caucasian celebrities have we heard of going to jail for this crime recently?”

According to CFO Daily News, the following entertainers or people of note have been in some type of trouble with the US Government for tax evasion:

Martha Stewart
Wesley Snipes
Nick Cage
Marc Anthony
Annie Leibovitz
Darryl Strawberry
Sophia Loren
“Joe The Plumber”
Ronald Isley
Arnold Schwarzeneggar
Toni Braxton
Tom Daschel
Stephen Baldwin
Pamela Anderson
Duane “Dog” Champman
Sinbad
Willie Nelson
Joe “Girls Gone Wild” Francis
Chuck Berry
Richard Pryor

To this list, we add; Beanie Sigel, Ja Rule and now Lauryn Hill.

Of the celebrities listed only a few actually went to jail for those tax-related crimes: Richard Pryor, Richard Hatch, Chuck Berry, Ronald Isley, Beanie Sigel, Ja Rule, Wesley Snipes, Sophia Loren and now, Lauryn Hill.

Now to be fair, it’s been reasoned that sometimes when you don’t take the plea deal the Government offers you, it can be to your detriment. However, it’s interesting to see that even in situations where the crimes are almost duplicate between offenders, one can get a slap on the wrist while the other can do hard time.

Take, for instance, the cases of Wesley Snipes and Stephen Baldwin. While they had pretty much the same crimes across the board, Baldwin admitted failing to pay New York State income taxes for 2008, 2009 and 2010. Stephen Baldwin subsequently received a plea bargain that resulted in no jail time and his record could be wiped clean if he paid back the $400,000 he owed within a year. Baldwin made a $100,000 down payment upon his arraignment and if he didn’t pay all the money within a year, the plea bargain provided for five years of probation and repayment within that time.

Whereas, Wesley Snipes did not take a plea deal, he instead chose to go to trial where he was convicted on misdemeanor crimes. Snipes was found guilty on three counts of failing to file a federal income tax return and owing the IRS $17 million in back taxes plus penalties and interest. He too tried to give the feds a good faith down payment, however it didn’t prevent him from doing time. As a result, Snipes was sentenced to three years in jail and served the time.

Says Forbes Magazine;

“You can be prosecuted for failure to file a tax return (a misdemeanor) or filing falsely (a felony). The latter is more serious and the penalties are more frightening. Mr. Snipes was tried on felony and misdemeanor tax charges, but only was convicted of misdemeanors.”

Interesting how the two are convicted of almost the same thing, but one gets to have his record expunged, goes home to his family at night and in the event he can not pay the amount owed in one year, will somehow receive an additional five years to pay back the money, with the addition of probation. And the other party gets locked up like he’s Nino Brown in real life form. Sort of ridiculous when you think about it. We only wish we had someone named Miss Hawkins to speak to on the matter. (If you got the reference give yourself a high five!)

So are African American celebrities being unfairly targeted, prosecuted and given stiffer sentences than their white counterparts? Or could the difference be between those who chose to take plea deals versus going to court?

Is it maybe the quality of counsel people are receiving from attorneys or could it possibly be a cultural attitude that lends toward fighting the system instead of giving in to it that keeps Black artists from taking the pleas that could keep them out of jail?

We’re not sure what the answers are, but we are sure that we will be paying close attention to this the next time we hear that someone is in trouble with the IRS.

Link

Percent of American Indians in jail is high
Print
February 26, 2009 6:00 pm • JODI RAVE Lee Enterprises
(0) Comments

If you're American Indian in Montana, you have a good chance of going to prison.

In 2008, 20 percent of the men in Montana prisons were Indian, while 27 percent of female inmates was Indian. The imprisonment is happening in a state where American Indians only make up about 7 percent of the state population, according a Montana Department of Corrections biennial report.

If state officials continue to imprison American Indian men and women at rates three to four times above the state's white population, more should be done to ensure American Indians have adequate representation before they end up behind bars. And if that doesn't work, at least give them a voice in prison such as white inmates have.

Montana is among a handful of states where Indians are disproportionately sent to prison, including North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and South Dakota. Consider these statistics from a 1999 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, American Indians and Crime:

n One out of every 200 American Indian adults is convicted of a felony crime, compared to one of every 300 white adults.

n More than 4 percent of the adult American Indian population is under correctional supervision, even though they only make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population. Only 2 percent of white adults were under correctional supervision.

n About half of American Indians under correctional supervision are in jail or prison, whereas less than a third of correctional populations nationwide are confined behind bars.

n The majority of federal cases filed against American Indians arose in Montana, South Dakota, Arizona and New Mexico.

A few steps can be taken - before and after imprisonment - to eliminate the adverse treatment of disadvantaged American Indian men and women who are denied the same opportunities as non-Indians who commit the same crimes.

First, Montana lawmakers should support a bill introduced by Rep. Carolyn Pease-Lopez, D-Billings, who is asking her colleagues in the Legislature to pass a law that would create a permanent position for an American Indian on the Montana Board of Pardons and Parole.

While the state parole board does have Native representatives, Pease-Lopez's bill would ensure a statutorily required position on the board. Too often, American Indian inmates, be they in jail or prison, suffer from institutionalized racism.

Ask anyone who knows the system. An American Indian on the parole board would ensure fair treatment.

Second, Montana lawmakers should see to it that jailed or imprisoned Native inmates fully understand their rights instead of being forced to enter guilty pleas on felony charges, a sure ticket to prison.

Three years ago Montana officials announced a federally funded pilot program to help American Indian people navigate the legal system before permanent lockup.

In February 2006, Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., and then-Montana Department of Corrections Bill Slaughter saw to it that an American Indian cultural officer be assigned to work with American Indian inmates in the Great Falls area, a crossroads for the Rocky Boy's, Fort Belknap and Blackfeet reservations.

Bob Anez, Corrections Department spokesman, said the program successfully connected disadvantaged American Indians to people who could help them with pretrial services, such as finding a lawyer before they signed a plea agreement.

The pilot program ended in December 2007.

Myrna Kuka, who served as the project's cultural adviser in Great Falls, said the program provided a rare opportunity to assist American Indians who have historically been denied adequate legal representation.

"It's just a given across the state," said Kuka, now the Corrections Department's Native American liaison. "Indians aren't knowledgeable about the laws in Montana and the options they have. They're treated differently because most Indians do not speak up."

Anez said cultural advisers like Kuka provide "a friendly face and a friendly voice," for American Indians. Kuka helped connect them with people who could explain their options. Non-Indians might consider putting the shoe on the other foot.

"How would you feel if you were brought into tribal court?" said Anez. "Would you be a little nervous about being before a judge and a system you didn't understand?"

State and federal lawmakers should take a hard look at overzealous correctional systems where decision-makers choose to be tougher on Indians.

Everyone involved with this system should be asking one question: What's wrong with this picture?

(Reach reporter Jodi Rave at 800-366-7186 or jodi.rave@lee.net, or read her blog at http://www.buffalopost.net.)

Link

Indian woman fasts to death in US jail
Yashwant Raj, Hindustan Times
Washington, January 29, 2012
Email to Author

Author’s Blog
First Published: 00:32 IST(29/1/2012)
Last Updated: 00:35 IST(29/1/2012)
Share more.
comments Tweet
Email print

An Indian woman who had been wrongly summoned for jury duty and was then arrested for not complying is reported to have starved herself to death in a Chicago prison.

Lyvita Gomes, 52, was from Mumbai, and authorities said she had been diagnosed with mental illness at the time of her imprisonment, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune.

Gomes was a flight attendant who moved to the US in 2004 to work with Delta Airlines, which had taken over her then employer Pan Am. She worked at the company head-office in Atlanta.

After being laid off five years ago, Gomes moved to Illinois and used her visa, which was still valid, to acquire a driving licence, which wrongly put her in the Lake county pool for jury duty.

Non-US citizens cannot serve on jury. But she got a notice of jury duty in July last year. Gomes didn’t respond. A court ordered her presence after she ignored all subsequent summons.

A police officer from the local sheriff’s office showed up at Vernon Hills hotel, where Gomes lived, to arrest her. She resisted, and was slapped with misdemeanor of resisting arrest.

At the county jail, authorities figured Gomes’s visa had expired. She was let off after two days as US immigration initiated deportation proceedings against her. The jury duty charge was dropped but the one for resisting arrest remained.

On a judge’s orders, Vernon Hills police arrested Gomes once again and brought her to the county jail on December 14.

Gomes soon went on a hunger strike. Questions have been raised why the medical staff, which knew of her mental condition, did not force-feed her.

“How in the US do we allow somebody to die from lack of food?” Madhvi Bahuguna, a friend and former co-worker of Gomes, said to the Chicago Tribune.

The medical services at the county jail were provided by a private company for a $2-million annual contract.

Link

[Shreeman]

Exhibit g -- now much shinier and cleaner. Very posh.

[krishnan]

Exhibit g -- now much shinier and cleaner. Very posh.

Caldwell gets several letters every week from tourists, especially from Asia, who write to complain about interactions they had with Hawaii's homeless population, Broder Van Dyke said. The complaints range from seeing someone urinate in public to being upset after an intoxicated person confronted a family.

[Shreeman]

Exhibit h -- dancing to a new tune. The rap sheets.

[Shreeman]

Exhibit i -- In Missouri, home of Ferguson; the love for life knows no bounds. It springs eternal like a malsi brook in a desert oasis.

[UlanBatori]

Ex-FBI Chief to Investigate

Most important issues in America:
1. When did the NFL know?
2. When did President BO know?
3. Why isn't he being impeached?

Time for the Congressional Hearings, like Iran-Contra. Now that "Dallas", "Dynasty" are all gone, we need something to watch in the afternoon!

[Shreeman]

Exhibit j -- So pro-life. Have another law. Prohibition worked wonders for wine. This is trivial by comparison.

[Shreeman]

Exhibit k -- something, something, ..., south park, ..., something, somwthing.

[Shreeman]

they should not have banned him outright..that's like going from 0 to 100 on punishment level. both his and his wife's (the victim) lives are ruined now that he is out of the only job he knows. a one year ban and a proclamation that it will be lifetime ban from now on, would have been better, methinks.

He is a gladiator in the true sense. Everyone on these teams is one. But money is not one of his problems. Nor is his life ruined -- his team won the championship last year and he was one of the stars. These are rich people tantrums, in this case, making equal-equal for all the bad white news coming out of late.

The wife (then not married) had no problem with the fight -- and went on to marry him. This is just attention deflection, costing the Rice couple (wife gets half) several 10s of millions but neither of them is remotely in the normal people problems domain.

The guy who killed a bunch of dogs was similarly punished and came back to play just fine. This guy is a running back, trust me on this, not playing will save a few brain cells and some sanity.

The story here is the non story.

ps -- specially for residents of ulan bator.

It is a good window into the psychology of domestic violence. Hear too many people on this forum making fun of wife for marrying and staying with the guy. Many women in India stay with abusive husbands for many reasons.
Let us not trivialize that.

No one is trivializing domestic violence.

You do recognise that she spat at him? The confrontation was going on forever. Both these individuals are very well off and knew there would be no consequences. Heck they went on to marry.

Choosing a bad spokeman is the worst thing you can do for any cause. These individuals (or Adrian Peterson, or Michael Vick or Ben Roethlisburger for that matter) are not good for representing anything bad. They can motivate good by good behavior but for anything bad (ie expected behavior) they (both of them) are about as representative as amitabh bachhan or sachin tendulkar is of the husband for an average indian woman. Or Princess Diana as a model of UK women.

They are not representative. They made themselves a laughing stock. Period. For domestic violence issues there are better examples daily that dont come with this baggage.

[Shreeman]

Exhibit l -- not worth my time to think of a comment.

[A_Gupta]

[A_Gupta]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/1 ... d-for-home

Preying on the elderly.

[Shreeman]

Not so long ago, in a land far far away....

[kancha]

17-yr-old In Critical Condition After Window Malfunction Leads to Tasering During Traffic

[Tanaji]

This beggars belief:

http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/index ... _case.html

School officials run sting operation that goes wrong

[A_Gupta]

SWAT teams go after barber shops:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/1 ... ed-Barbers

That too, after they had cleared inspection just a few days earlier:

On August 19, 2010, two days before the sweep, Inspector Fields and another DBPR inspector conducted walkthroughs of six of the target locations, including Strictly Skillz. Though the purpose of the walkthrough was to gather information for the operation, the inspectors did so under the guise of performing a routine inspection, verifying that the barbers’ licenses were current and valid and inspecting the barbers’ workstations. During the inspection of Strictly Skillz, the barbers were cooperative, no violations were found, and no citations were issued. Inspector Fields even commended Berry on the tremendous progress he had made in the shop.

Despite the fact that just two days earlier Strictly Skillz had passed inspection without any problems whatsoever and that the DBPR is permitted to conduct inspections only once every two years, on August 21, 2010, OCSO and the DBPR conducted a second inspection as part of the sting operation.

(from the comments).

[habal]

USA

where homeless man survives by having sex daily. Third Worlders can now go and drown in their jealousy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmav517MQJc

[Gus]

sorry if posted earlier...too many like this to even keep track of

man does cosplay (dressing up in character), somebody calls police as suspicious, police comes and shoots him dead, with SIX SHOTS IN THE BACK !!!!!

and then claims he was lunging at them with sword !!!


http://www.skynews.com.au/news/world/nt ... gear-.html

Randall Edwards said at a news conference that it's likely 22-year-old Darrien Hunt was dressed as a Japanese anime character and role-playing when he was shot.

That, he says, could explain why Hunt was carrying a sword.

Edwards accused Saratoga Springs police of using excessive force and treating Darrien Hunt differently because he was black.

'I just can't believe that this kid in the costume was somehow posing such a threat to the officers or everybody else that deadly force was the first and only option,' Edwards said.

Authorities say race played no role in the shooting.

They say officers were reacting to Hunt lunging at them with the steel sword.

Hunt was killed on September 10 in a shopping centre after police responded to a call about a suspicious man with a sword.

The Utah County Sheriff's Office, which is overseeing the investigation of the shooting, said it was learning more about what happened but has no indication that race was a factor.

In a statement, prosecutors said it will be several weeks until their review is complete. They declined to provide further details.

The office did, however, release a photo of the sword Hunt carried that day. It shows a blade that is 0.6 metres long with a point. The Hunt family previously described it as a play sword with a plastic blade.

Edwards said it a decorative sword, not a weapon. He also said an independent autopsy done for the family shows Darrien Hunt was shot six times from behind, with the fatal shot hitting Hunt square in the back.

Authorities have not disclosed the results of an autopsy by the coroner's office or discussed the shooting in detail.

The city of Saratoga Springs said in a statement on Friday that officials are confident in the officers involved in the shooting and their training.

[A_Gupta]

Americans and Secession:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/2 ... -secession

[pankajs]

Whites pay homage to the black unarmed teen who was murdered by police by burning his memorial

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/tensions-mo ... al-burned/

Tensions mount in Ferguson again after Michael Brown memorial burned

FERGUSON, Mo. - Violence broke out again in Ferguson, Mo., a community still reeling from the effects of an unarmed teen gunned down by a white police officer last month.

A group smashed up the windows of a beauty parlor, and gunshots could be heard nearby, according to witnesses.

No police on scene yet. Young people breaking into Beauty Town. "Burn it down!" one yells.
— Antonio French (@AntonioFrench) September 24, 2014

Witnesses also reported hearing gunshots near the scene of the disturbance. It's unclear if they were related.

The St. Louis County Police Department told CBS affiliate KMOV in St. Louis officers arrived on the scene after an unruly crowd began to gather around 9:00 p.m. St. Louis County Police are assisting the Ferguson Police Department.

Crowd had crossed W. Florissant. Chanting, "Fight Back," and "Arrest Darren Wilson." @kmov #ferguson pic.twitter.com/8zKaTDTRyv
— Jasmine Huda (@jhuda) September 24, 2014

Crowd moves into the street towards police. https://t.co/hoTFZGM9JE
— Antonio French (@AntonioFrench) September 24, 2014

A crowd gathered near Beauty Town, the store smashed up Tuesday evening, after police arrived. Witnesses said police tried to disburse the group, which was chanting slogans related to the killing of the teen.

The owner of Beauty Town told a KMOV reporter "this is the third time we've been hit."

Earlier Tuesday, officials announced they were canceling the annual Ferguson Music Festival amid safety concerns, reports KMOV.

Before the announcement, a makeshift memorial to Michael Brown, the 18-year-old killed last month, was burned down under still unclear circumstances.

...
About two dozen residents gathered at the site Tuesday morning, many of them angry. One man said it was like a grave being desecrated.

Many were not willing to believe some reports that candles making up part of the display were responsible for the fire, and told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch they smelled gasoline.

[member_22733]

In the US we value the life of everything, including a fertilized human egg, which is why we banned abortion.

[chanakyaa]

Stop and seize

Aggressive police take hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists not charged with crimes

This makes our pandoos look gentlemen..settling for a small sum after hard negotiation