Sunday, June 21, 2015



Multicultural rapist released halfway through sentence went on to attack three more while on parole including a schoolgirl who was raped in front of her boyfriend



A 'predatory' rapist released less than halfway into his sentence went onto rape a schoolgirl and sexually assault two other victims, a court heard.

Daniel Elliot was originally jailed for just over five years in 2010 for raping a Japanese exchange student in London.

The 24-year-old, who was released than two-and-a-half years later, has now been sentenced to life after he was convicted of carrying out a string of horrific sexual assaults while on licence from prison.

One of the serial rapist's victims was just 16 when he raped her in front of her boyfriend.

The pair, both 16, were walking home through Beddington Park, Carshalton on September 5 last year in the early hours of the morning when Elliot approached.

He then threatened them with pepper spray, holding the can up to the girl's eyes while he raped her, the court heard.

Addressing Elliot, the judge told him: 'You said you were armed with pepper spray and the male started crying and screaming.

'You raped the victim and asked her if she liked it and had your hand over her mouth.'

She has since undergone a series of health checks for sexually transmitted diseases and always carried a personal alarm after the traumatising assault.

The court heard she felt she had lost her independence while her father said he felt as though he had failed in his responsibilities to protect her.

Elliot, who denied all charges, was convicted of the rape of the schoolgirl at Croydon Crown Court.

He was also found guilty of the attempted rape and digital penetration of a 15-year-old and the sexual assault of a 28 year-old woman in Mellows Park, Wallington on August 3.

'These were attacks on strangers in public places at night, within six weeks of each other, during which you claimed to have a weapon,' Judge Flahive told the serial rapist.

'There was a degree of targeting. They were all terrified and have been psychologically effected by what happened, the effects are great.'

The 15-year-old schoolgirl was also assaulted in front of a male friend in a playground on the evening of November 15 last year.

She was in Grove Park with a 17-year-old boy when Elliot attacked, threatening to stab them if they didn't go along with his demands.

'You punched the boy to the ground and held him down, saying you would hurt him and had a knife,' said Judge Daniel Flahive.

Fearing her friend would be killed, she submitted to Elliot's demands.

The court heard that the attack had a serious impact on the young victim who felt 'angry.'

'The fifteen year-old girl was a bright student whose character has now changed and is now angry and aggressive,' added the judge.

'She has changed her appearance and lost weight.

'The parents feel their daughter has been taken away from them.'

During the attack on the 28-year-old, Elliot had followed her off the bus as she made her way home from work.

He had then attacked threatening to stab her unless she let him rape her.

'You grabbed her from behind and said you were going to stab her,' the judge told Elliot.

'You forced her to the ground while threatening to stab her and you had your hand around her neck and were choking her and forced your hand into her knickers.'

All the offences took place while Elliot was on licence after he was released from jail on October 5, 2012, just two-and-a-half years into his sentence for the summer 2010 attack on the Japanese tourist who asked him for directions in Beckenham.

Today he was sentenced at Croydon Crown Court to life imprisonment - with an eight-year minimum.

Judge Flahive warned: 'You have to be regarded as a dangerous offender and you will only be released when the parole board think it is safe.'

Government guidelines mean that offenders who are sentenced to two years or more will generally serve half their sentence in prison and serve the rest of the sentence in the community on licence.

If an offender breaches licence conditions, they may be recalled to prison to serve out their entire sentence.

SOURCE






The Trans Fat Ban Is Worse Than You Think

The Food and Drug Administration issued a final decision this week, giving the food industry three years to phase out bad trans fats, still used in a wide variety of products, such as Pillsbury’s Ready To Bake cookies and cake frosting. Now, if you’re ingesting large quantities of either, perhaps partially hydrogenated oils aren’t your biggest concern in life. But if the government’s goal is to prevent cardiovascular disease and preventing cardiovascular disease is all that matters, why stop there?

The FDA alleges that phasing out trans fats will prevent about 7,000 premature deaths each year. (If you believe that these things can be quantified with that sort of precision, you have far too much faith in crusading bureaucracies. Years ago, I attempted to tally up the deaths that various studies, public interest groups and government agencies had attributed to obesity, smoking, salt, trans fats, meat, etc., and came up with a number larger than the number of all Americans who’d passed away that year.) But 610,000 Americans die from cardiovascular disease each year. Will 603,000 be left for corporate America to slaughter because we won’t act? The negative externalities of allowing people to eat whatever they desire are huge.

So if we can ban trans fats in an effort to curtail heart disease, I wish someone would explain what stops the state from banning any unhealthful ingredient it feels like. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the leading reasons for higher risk of heart disease are diabetes, obesity, poor diet, physical inactivity and excessive alcohol use.

How could the FDA allow us to keep pumping high-fructose corn syrup into our gullets now that we all understand it’s a contributor to the spike in obesity over the past 30 years? Why do we still sell alcohol, a product that is by any measure more unhealthful than the small amounts of trans fats average Americans consume?

The CDC also contends that if you want to prevent heart disease, the most important thing you can do is to not smoke. Yet our own president (African-American men, incidentally, are at the highest risk for heart disease) may be inhaling tobacco smoke in the White House — a substance far more toxic than trans fats. About 443,000 people die from smoking every year.

Now, President Obama could argue that until very recently, there was no guiding principle in American governance to impel him to try to make sure that every citizen is living salubriously. Maybe, like many other Americans, Obama deems the sensorial benefits of his (onetime?) habit worth the health risk. Maybe I feel the same way about my Haagen-Dazs. As with smoking, there is no lack of transparency when it comes to the inherent dangers of too much trans fat.

Most people, of course, don’t really care whether partially hydrogenated oils fall out of the food supply. What they do care about are the unremitting efforts of politicians to micromanage their lives. Once consumers heard about the risks associated with trans fats, they began avoiding them, and businesses consequently stopped using them as much. Between 1980 and 2009, Americans' consumption of trans fats dropped by about a third (as did our intake of saturated fats). The FDA claims that “trans fat intake among American consumers has declined from 4.6 grams per day in 2003 to about 1 gram per day in 2012.”

As Baylen Linnekin, the founder of the Keep Food Legal Foundation, points out, the American Heart Association has suggested that Americans consume “less than 2 grams of trans fats a day.” So, he argues, “if the FDA and AHA are correct, then current consumption levels — prior to and without any ban — are well within safe levels.”

Even with the decline, the FDA banned trans fats. Left-wing intrusions — small and large — follow a similar trajectory. First come reasonable calls for increased transparency (labeling regulations). If the public remains pigheaded, it’s time to scare you (chilling studies and over-the-top predictions). If that doesn’t work, leftists will discourage you (higher taxes and more regulations). And finally, they’ll force you (banning or mandating) to comply.

With all this, we should not forget the favorite weapon of do-gooders: lawsuits. Government unleashes the lawyers to do their work, punishing companies that fail to comply, even ahead of the deadline. The usual collection of class action attorneys and professional bullies sue food companies that continue to use trans fats for various financial reasons — for example, taste and increased shelf life.

In today’s world, the idea that government could dictate, say, what sort of sexual relationships a person can indulge in — whether they are bad for one’s health or even a public risk — would seem preposterous. Even banning pot is beginning to be regarded as useless intrusion by millions. Yet allowing government to decide what we eat (or what our kids eat) is now considered a moral imperative.

After years of pressure from trial attorneys and junk-science public interest groups, the Obama administration has followed through with its pledge to ban what is — in the amounts most Americans ingest — a benign ingredient. But even if it’s not, we have labels for a reason. It’s unlikely the ban will do anything but create precedents that allow further intrusions into how and what we eat. Which is precisely the point.

SOURCE






UKIP and the Gay Pride March

(UKIP is a party with the primary aim of getting Britain out of the EU)

Sean Gabb‏

On the 6th June 2015, the organisers of the Gay Pride March in London announced that they had rejected an application from the UK Independence Party to take part. They had given in to a petition which called UKIP “inherently homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, racist and misogynistic.”

Before making my statement on this ban, I will say the following:

1. I am not, nor ever have been a member of UKIP, and I voted Conservative in last month’s general election.

2. I started denouncing the laws against all-male sex in the 1970s – that is, before many of our leading “gay rights” activists had started filling their nappies. Some of these denunciations were in writing, and enough of them survive and can be found on my website to show that I am telling the truth. I will add that saying what I said as a schoolboy and as a young man could get more than funny looks. It never did in my case, but there was always a risk, and I took that risk.

3. So far as I am concerned, the meaning of “gay rights” begins and ends with the right to do with your own as you please, and to associate as you please with other consenting adults. This means no criminal laws against all-male sex, and no discrimination by the State. It also means no special laws against all-male erotica and no special laws to protect “public decency.” Since I do not believe in general laws against adult erotica, and believe that the old laws against causing a breach of the peace are all that is needed for the regulation of public behaviour, what I mean is complete freedom of speech and a relaxed view of what should be tolerated in the streets.

4. I have no principled objection to gay marriage. I wrote in its favour in the 1980s, and still see no reason why the bundle of declarations and agreements that constitute marriage should not be available to all who want it.

Now this, broadly speaking, seems to be the position taken by my gay friends in UKIP. It seems also largely to be the position taken in public by Nigel Farage. By the standards of twenty five years ago, the UKIP line on gay issues is outrageously libertarian. Why ban its representatives from joining in a gay march?

The answer, I regret, is that the gay movement is no longer about the basic human rights recognised in the English liberal tradition. It is about sectional privilege – privilege that can only be granted and maintained by an enlarged and intrusive state. UKIP and Nigel Farage are condemned because they are against anti-discrimination laws. Their position on these is called “bigotry.”

However, part of the right of association is the right not to associate. Two men should certainly have the right to live together in matrimony. But no one should be forced to bake their wedding cake. If you are running a business, you are risking your money and your time. If you do not wish to do business with people, for whatever reason, that should be your unquestioned right. It may be unwise of you to turn away paying business. It may be small-minded of you. But that should be your right. It is a right of exactly the same kind as the right of two men to have sex with each other.

If you are a minister of religion, you should not be compelled to solemnise a gay marriage. Or, if you do solemnise a gay marriage against the rules of your denomination, you should have no right to any legal redress if you are suspended from or deprived of your position. A religion is a private organisation, formally or effectively separate from the British State. The British State has no right to interfere in its internal affairs, unless these are actively hostile to the lives, liberties or property of others.

Freedom of speech involves the right to publish and to consume erotica. It also involves the right to express disgust for the acts portrayed, and to speak ill of anyone who enjoys them. None of this involves the right to cause a breach of the peace, as traditionally known. But no one should suffer any punishment for speaking out for or against any particular sexual act or any particular lifestyle.

As an aide, let me deal with the claim that UKIP is a “racist” and a “xenophobic” organisation. I do not believe this to be true. But, if true, it is irrelevant. Disliking men whose taste is for all-male sex and disliking foreigners may be equally uncharitable. But they are logically separate. You can oppose mass-immigration on the grounds that it displaces the traditional occupiers of a territory. This has no automatic bearing on how those traditional occupiers should be allowed to behave. And the distinction is not abstract. I know identitarians who are strongly opposed to third world immigration and multiculturalism, but who are indifferent to all-male sex.

I might add that many of the newcomers are not indifferent to all-male sex, and that the areas in which they predominate can be rather unfriendly to men whose taste is for all-male sex.

Of course, Gay Pride is a private organisation, and it has the same right as a Christian baker should have not to associate with people it dislikes. But, I repeat, it is generally the case that the mainstream gay movement in this country has moved away from the liberal fundamentals that it preached from the 1950s until the 1990s. It has become an increasingly sinister interest group pushing for censorship and coerced association. When not able to use the criminal and civil laws to this effect, it has demanded and obtained equally effective administrative policies.

This change of nature is wrong in itself. It is also against the long term interests of its alleged beneficiaries. All the freedoms we presently enjoy are the fruits of the English liberal tradition. Every denial of those fruits to some lay down a precedent for their denial to others. For the past generation, the old prejudices against all-male sex have been dissolving. Who can say what the next generation will bring?

Via email






UK Muslims helping jihadis, says Cameron: Communities must stop 'quietly condoning' barbaric ISIS, PM warns in blunt speech

Dave seems to be growing a spine

Too many British Muslims ‘quietly condone’ extremism, David Cameron will say today.

In a blunt speech, he will urge families to speak out against the ‘poisonous ideology’ driving hundreds of young people to wage jihad for Islamic State.

The Prime Minister will also call for parents to stop blaming police and the security services for failing to prevent British teenagers heading to Syria.

Parts of the Muslim community are guilty of normalising hatred of democracy and western values, he warns – making it easier for violent extremism to take hold.

At the weekend, 17-year-old Talha Asmal became Britain’s youngest suicide bomber when he detonated a car loaded with explosives in the northern Iraqi town of Baiji.

Speaking at a major security conference in Slovakia, Mr Cameron will say: ‘We’ve always had angry young men and women buying into supposedly revolutionary causes. This one is evil, it is contradictory, it is futile.’

But he will point out it is easier to go from being a troubled teenager to a jihadist if extremism ‘is quietly condoned online or perhaps even in parts of your local community’.

Islamic State and its medieval outlook are ‘one of the biggest threats our world has faced’, the Prime Minister will add.

The speech, made the day after the start of the holy festival of Ramadan, is likely to spark anger in parts of the Muslim community.

But Downing Street said Mr Cameron believed parents must speak out.

A source said people should ‘look at the radicalisation of people here in the UK and what is going on in the areas where they live, their households and their communities’.  ‘People should voice their concerns,’ the source said. ‘There might be more senior people in their community they want to talk to, or they can talk to the authorities or the police.’

Mr Cameron’s intervention comes amid mounting concern about the radicalisation of young British Muslims.

On Monday, it emerged that three British sisters from Bradford and their nine children had travelled to join IS in Syria.

Suicide bomber Asmal’s family, from Dewsbury, also in West Yorkshire, said they were left ‘utterly devastated and heartbroken’.

Mr Cameron will say the cases are part of a grave trend that threatens Britain: ‘These are young people, boys and girls, leaving often loving, well-to-do homes, good schools and bright prospects travelling thousands of miles from home to strap explosives to their chests and blow themselves up and kill innocent people.

'To live in a place where marriage is legal at nine and where women’s role is to serve the jihadists, to be part of a so-called state whose fanatics are plotting and encouraging acts of despicable terrorism in the countries from which they have come.’

The Prime Minister will further warn that they are driven by an extremist ideology, parts of which have at least a foothold in ordinary British Muslim communities.

He will say: ‘It is an Islamist extremist ideology – one that says the West is bad and democracy is wrong, that women are inferior and homosexuality is evil.

‘It says religious doctrine trumps the rule of law and caliphate trumps nation state and it justifies violence in asserting itself and achieving its aims. The question is: how do people arrive at this world view?

‘One of the reasons is there are people who hold some of these views who don’t go as far as advocating violence, but do buy into some of these prejudices giving the extreme Islamist narrative weight and telling fellow Muslims “you are part of this”. This paves the way for young people to turn simmering prejudice into murderous intent. To go from listening to firebrand preachers online to boarding a plane to Istanbul and travelling to join the jihadis.’

Mr Cameron will hit out at those in the Muslim community who have blamed the security services for failing to stop the estimated 700 youngsters who have travelled to join IS in recent months. ‘Too often we hear the argument that radicalisation is the fault of someone else,’ he will say.

Today’s speech has echoes of a 2011 address in which Mr Cameron blamed multiculturalism for allowing the rise of extremism in Britain.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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