Friday, August 29, 2008

Race row policeman told to ''shut up'' and get on with his job

The Times 29 August 2008

Sean O Neill, Crime Editor

The country’s most senior Asian policeman was told by his superiors last night to “shut up” and get on with his job after publicly announcing that he was suing Scotland Yard for racism.

Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur was rebuked after appearing before TV cameras in full uniform to accuse Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, of subjecting him to years of racial discrimination.Within two hours the Met’s Deputy Commissioner responded angrily. Sir Paul Stephenson said: “I think it is long past time that we all shut up, stop making public statements about private disputes and get on with the job we are paid to do.”

The Times understands that the Yard’s lawyers are examining whether Mr Ghaffur’s behaviour amounts to insubordination. Questions are also being asked by his colleagues about whether he can continue to sit with them on the Met’s senior management board, which directs police strategy in the capital.

Yesterday’s bitter exchanges followed months of backbiting and infighting at Scotland Yard and made the internal civil war a public affair.

Mr Ghaffur, a police officer since 1974, opened hostilities by confirming speculation that he was taking the Met to an employment tribunal. Accompanied by his lawyer, he held a press conference at a West End hotel to announce that he was taking his legal action with “deep regret”. His central grievance is that his contract has not been renewed beyond March and he is being removed from the job of devising security arrangements for the 2012 Olympic Games. Mr Ghaffur said: “My current case is essentially to do with my treatment at the highest levels of the Met, in particular the discrimination I have been subject to over a long period of time by the present Commissioner.”

Sir Paul responded with his stinging rebuke. The Deputy Commissioner said that he had advised Mr Ghaffur on Wednesday night against making a public show of his dispute with his boss but that advice had been ignored. Sir Paul added: “That is a matter for him to reconcile with what he considers to be his proper responsibilities as one of this country’s most senior police officers.”He added: “We do not accept the charges of discrimination against us ’’

The high-profile dispute will further undermine Sir Ian’s position. One senior officer told The Times: “The whole situation simply serves to sap the morale of the men and women who do the real work of policing London.”


Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Dead baby found at recycling centre

August 27, 2008
Nico Hines The Times

The body of a newborn baby was found amongst the rubbish at a recycling plant in Cambridgeshire today.The grim discovery was made by a member of staff at the site in Fengate, Peterborough.

Cambridgeshire police have sealed off the area.The spokeswoman said the baby had yet to be identified. It is not yet known if the body was that of a boy or a girl.

A council spokesman said: “The materials recycling facility will remain closed while police continue their investigation following the tragic discovery.There will be no disruption to bin collections during this time.''

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Bank account details sold on eBay for £35

The (London)Times

August 26, 2008
Heath Aston
Personal bank account details of up to one million Natwest and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) customers have been found on a computer that was sold for £35 on eBAY, the online auction site. The information on the computer is believed to include names, addresses, mobile phone numbers, bank account numbers, sort codes, credit card numbers, mothers' maiden names and even signatures.
The computer, which was "inappropriately" sold by an employee at Graphic Data, an Essex-based company, also contained sensitive balance transfer information about American Express credit card customers. An IT expert who bought the computer discovered the data in the hard drive of the computer.
"Graphic Data has confirmed to us that one of their machines has been inappropriately sold on via a third party," RBS said in a statement. "As a result, historical data relating to credit card applications of some of our customers and data from other banks were removed. We take this issue extremely seriously and are working to resolve this regrettable loss of Graphic Data as a matter of urgency."
It is unclear if the customers whose details were exposed will be forced to change their credit cards and bank accounts.
The companies involved in the blunder could be forced to pay a fine. Last year, the Financial Services Authority fined Nationwide £980,000 after it lost a laptop containing customer information.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

UK economic growth shudders to a halt

By Telegraph staff
22 August 2008

The UK economy ground to a standstill last quarter, putting to an end the country's longest stretch of growth in more than a century.
Britain's gross domestic product failed to expand in the three months to the end of June, figures from the Office for National Statistics showed today. The figure was worse than economists had expected and weaker than an initial estimate for the period.The news delivers a huge blow to Gordon Brown whose popularity is plunging as the economy heads toward its first recession since the early 1990s.It will also add pressure on the Bank of England to put aside its concern about the inflation threat and deliver the cuts in interest rates signalled in the Inflation Report earlier this month.
Britain emerged from its last recession in 1991.

Friday, August 22, 2008

Home Office loses data on all UK prisoners

Daily Telegraph
By Robert Winnett, Deputy Political Editor
22 Aug 2008

The Home Office has lost confidential information on every prisoner in the country and more than 40,000 serious criminals sparking yet another Government data crisis. It has led to fears that the taxpayer may now face a multi-million pound compensation bill from criminals whose safety may be compromised. The home addresses of some of Britain's most prolific and serious offenders - including those who have committed violent and sexual crimes - are understood to be among the data now missing. They were on a computer memory stick used by Home Office consultants which has gone missing over the past week. A full investigation has been launched and the police have been informed.
The latest data scandal follows the loss of 25 million child benefit records last year and details of millions of learner drivers and army recruits earlier this year. Whitehall departments were ordered to tighten procedures in the wake of the previous crises and the latest loss has stunned insiders.
It is understood that PA Consulting were employed by the Home Office to track and analyse serious and prolific offenders as part of the JTrack programme. The Home Office sent confidential personal details on the criminals to the consulting company on a secure encrypted email which was then transferred in an unencrypted form onto a computer memory stick. The stick is now missing.
The Home Office said that the missing data included information - such as home addresses - on 33,000 individuals who have committed at least six offences in the past year. There is also data on about 10,000 people regarded as "prolific and other priority offenders" by the Government. Details of every prisoner in England and Wales - 84,000 people - including their expected release date and date of home detention curfew - is also on the stick along with information about drug treatment programmes.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

British Submission

By Douglas Stone
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, August 21, 2008

Foot baths for Muslim students at Michigan universities? Muslim cabbies in the Twin Cities who refuse to carry seeing-eye dogs? The FBI and other government agencies taking sensitivity training from radical Muslim organizations? You think we’ve lost the plot over here? Take a look at British submission to Islamofascist demands and threats, as that once great nation succumbs to creeping dhimmitude.
It has reached the point that in mid-April, the British Foreign Office instructed the Royal Navy not to return pirates to jurisdictions sporting sharia law (such as Somalia) for fear that their human rights will be violated. They have even been discouraged from capturing pirates, because the freebooters might ask to be granted asylum in Britain, a request with which the UK might have to comply under international and European Union human rights law. This for a Navy that almost singlehandedly defeated piracy in the early 19th century, and a nation that retained the death penalty for this scourge of the high seas until the late 20th century.
Welcome to Britain today.
Another recent outrage involves special handling of a traffic violation. Seems that a Muslim driver was stopped by police while speeding between two homes in the north of England. When he appeared in court, he explained his high speed (over twice the speed limit) was necessary to accommodate his two wives. His explanation was accepted, and he was allowed to keep his license.
That comes fast - very fast - on the heels of a decision by the British government to grant full spousal benefits to multiple wives. It won’t affect more than an estimated 1,000 individuals. And it mercifully won’t affect the indigenous Christian, Hindu or Jewish population, as traditional bigamy laws apply. Britons may rest easy, as it will only cover multiple wives married in a jurisdiction that practices Sharia law, such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
These are not isolated instances; there are a myriad more: Swimming periods at pools restricted to Muslims only; the establishment of a BBC Arabic language station staffed by Arab broadcasters and managers with track records of being anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Western; the refusal of female Muslim medical students to wash their arms as that practice might reveal the forbidden flesh between wrist and elbow; an attempt by a national union of university lecturers to call for a boycott of Israeli academics; and, a local Council ban on pig-themed toys, porcelain figures and calendars on workers’ desks because it might offend Muslims.
No comment from the Home Office or No. 10 Downing Street. No comment from the government, because it has been their policy to appease Britain’s large Muslim population in response to menacing behavior up to and including the bomb outrages of July 7, 2005.
It’s no coincidence that Muslims constitute a substantial portion of the Labour Party’s electoral support in London and in much of its heartland in northern England. In the expected close election for Parliament that will be held by mid-2010, an increasing Muslim population may be the difference between victory and defeat for the Labourites.
But Labour’s bien pensant hardly needs convincing. Like most on the left today, they fancy themselves champions of the underdog and the oppressed, and sympathy for Islam, and Arab and Muslim causes fits neatly into their intellectual program. Along with America and Israel-bashing, it goes to the very heart of how liberals view themselves and, more important, how they wish to be viewed by others. It supplies them with the appearance of a self-abnegation that is supposed to relieve their Western, middle-class guilt with a cleansing humility but is nothing but moral exhibitionism; and, as always, involves other people’s money, other people’s freedom, and other people’s comfort – never or very rarely their own.
A classic of political correctness run amok, wonderful as a burlesque if it weren’t slowly undermining Britain’s way of life and its will to oppose extreme Islamism.
Worse is that acceding to this nonsense gives Islamofascists confidence that they are on the winning side of history. That if they just shout a little louder and push a little harder, they may expect more of the same that becomes increasingly normative until it convinces the longer-settled among the UK’s population that they have no power to stop, let alone reverse, the process.
One might have become inured to the gutless behavior of France or Italy, but many in the U.S. are still under the impression that, like other countries in the Anglosphere, the British remain clear-eyed, realistic and most importantly resolute about the threats with which the West is confronted. But they aren’t; and while these cultural changes are in the realm of the comical right now, they are beginning to affect British public policy, domestic as well as foreign.
Why is this important to us? Because the ZaNuLabour Party,s tendency to pacifism and appeasement, and its devotion to political correctness, victim ideology, cultural relativism and liberal guilt is shared by our own Democrats.
Look for more of it in Britain, and don’t be surprised when it arrives full force here in America.
________________________________________

BBC's Children in Need funded 7/7 terrorist propaganda, says Newsnight

Daily Telegraph 20 August 2008
By Christopher Hope and Duncan Gardham

Thousands of pounds raised by Britons for the BBC’s Children in Need charity could have been used to recruit and train the homegrown terrorists involved in the 7/7 terror attacks on London. Some of the cash could also have been used to fund the propaganda activities of the suicide bombers who killed 52 people in July 2005, according to an investigation by BBC 2’s Newsnight.
The programme reported that £20,000 from Children in Need was handed over to the Leeds Community School, in Beeston, Yorkshire between 1999 and 2002. The school, which also received large sums from other public bodies, was run from premises behind the Iqra Islamic bookshop which the gang used as a meeting place and an opportunity to radicalise others. Both Mohammed Sidique Khan, the leader of the bombers, and Shehzad Tanweer, the Aldgate bomber, were trustees of the bookshop and Sidique Khan also worked for a Saturday club at the associated Leeds Community School.
Both the bookshop and the school were registered charities, the bookshop claimed, on Charity Commission submissions, that its aim was the advancement of the Islamic faith, while the school’s aim was said to be to advance the education of Pakistani and Bangladeshi pupils. They also produced a leaflet in the wake of September 11 blaming the attacks on a Jewish conspiracy.
Glyn Gaskarth, policy analyst at the TaxPayers Alliance, added: It beggars belief that a charity promoted at licence fee payers’ expense paid money to dubious organisations without ensuring they did not have extremist links. People imagine their money goes to genuine good causes, not to organisations apparently frequented by fanatics. There needs to be proper checks and balances in place to make sure no other grants are being given to places peddling extremist views.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

UK warned of imminent recession

The Sunday Times
August 17, 2008
UK warned of imminent recession by British Chambers of Commerce
David Smith
THE British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) will this week become the first leading business group to predict a recession in Britain.
Its quarterly economic forecast, to be published tomorrow, is expected to say that Britain is heading into a “technical” recession of two or more quarters of declining gross domestic product over the next six to nine months.
It will say that a deep recession, of the kind last experienced by Britain in the early 1990s, remains unlikely, but that the risks to the economy have grown significantly over the past quarter and unemployment is set to climb by up to 300,000.
The BCC believes recession is now a more serious threat to the economy than inflation and the Bank of England should start cutting interest rates as soon as inflation peaks in two to three months. It thinks Bank rate will be reduced to 4.75% by the end of the year and that there will be scope for a further cut next year.
The monetary policy committee cannot ignore the fact that recession threats have worsened,” said David Kern, the BCC’s economic adviser. “Limiting the threat of a deep recession must be the priority.”
The centrepiece of the forecast is very weak consumer spending, partly as a result of falling house prices. But the BCC, which represents Britain’s small and medium-sized businesses, also expects investment spending to be hit.
It will warn the government that, while the public finances are in a bad way, the Treasury should not make things worse for firms by raising business taxes. However, it will predict a significant widening of the budget deficit and a breach of the so-called sustainable investment rule, which aims to keep government debt below 40% of GDP.
The BCC’s forecast follows a gloomy assessment from the Bank of England, which said last week that the economy would be “broadly flat” over the next 12 months. Figures released showed inflation at a 16-year high of 4.4% and the biggest monthly rise in unemployment since late 1992. Both the eurozone and Japan reported declining GDP in the second quarter, hitting hopes that strong export demand would help offset the squeeze on the domestic economy.
In the past few days there have been significant shifts in global markets, with gold dropping below $800 an ounce, oil continuing to fall and the dollar gaining ground against all currencies, pushing the pound down to a two-year low of $1.86.
Whether sterling continues to fall against the dollar depends partly on the Bank’s interest-rate moves. Minutes of its August monetary policy committee meeting will be released this week and are expected to show a 7-2 vote in favour of leaving Bank rate unchanged at 5%, with David Blanchflower voting for a cut but Tim Besley favouring a rise.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

British Muslims 'fighting with Taliban in Afghanistan'

By Con Coughlin, Duncan Gardham and Thomas Harding Last Updated: 12:25PM BST 02 Aug 2008

British Muslims are helping the Taliban in their war against UK soldiers in southern Afghanistan, according to the former commander of Britain's forces in Afghanistan.

Brig. Ed Butler: 'There are British passport holders who live in the U.K. who are being found in places like Kandahar.' Brig. Ed Butler, who spent six months commanding British forces in Afghanistan, also revealed fears that militant Islamic groups in south-east Asia are supporting terrorist plots in the UK.
The brigadier, a former head of the SAS, spoke exclusively to the Daily Telegraph in the week when the British death toll in Afghanistan reached 114, with 17 fatalities in the last two months.
UK forces have uncovered evidence that British Muslims are actively supporting the Taliban and al-Qa'eda in attacks on coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, Brig Butler said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/2485750/British-Muslims-fighting-with-Taliban-in-Afghanistan.html

July 7 terror attacks: Bomb plot trial collapses

By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent Last Updated: 9:03PM BST 01 Aug 2008

The trial of the three men accused of helping the July 7 bombers plan their attack has collapsed after the jury failed to reach verdicts.
Waheed Ali, 25, Sadeer Saleem, 28, and Mohammed Shakil, 32, are the only people ever to be charged in connection with the bombings which killed 52 people.
The three men, all from Beeston in Leeds, were accused of conducting a "hostile reconnaissance" mission for the bombers seven months before the attacks.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2485578/July-7-terror-attacks-Bomb-plot-trial-collapses.html