Brian Ross wrote on Mar 8^th, 2015 at 6:29pm:

You know when a Muslim bugger like you is cornered - he starts talking about the Jews.

Chinese officials recently trumpeted the return of an “economic fugitive” from Italy as a precedent-setting moment in the country’s long battle to snare corrupt officials and other white collar criminals who have fled overseas with ill-gotten gains.

“This extradition case will serve as a demonstration for other western countries,” a Ministry of Public Security official promised. But many foreign governments are still reluctant to cooperate with Beijing’s global manhunt: see Australia as Exhibit A.

The Australian government under prime minister John Howard signed an extradition treaty with China in 2007, which excluded “political offenses” and any instance when the person sought could face the death penalty and gave the Chinese government the right to seize any property in Australia that the wanted individual has acquired. (The death penalty exclusion is particularly relevant now—China just executed a former mining tycoon accused of corruption who said tearfully during his trial that he had been framed.)

But the Australian legislature never enacted legislation to implement the treaty, which is required before it can take effect, and the pact’s status is now the subject of some dispute.

Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop told reporters in November that “Australia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with China and that present money laundering laws were adequate for dealing with the problem,” the Australian newspaper reported.

Shortly after that comment was made, Chinese president Xi Jinping visited Australia. According to an official in China’s foreign ministry, officials discussed the unratified treaty during the trip and “Australia pledged to speed up the approval,” Xinhua reported.

A spokesperson for the Australian attorney general’s office told Quartz that, despite Bishop’s statement, the implementation of the 2007 extradition treaty is still “subject to ongoing consideration.” Australia can still consider extradition requests from China based on several multilateral treaties both countries have signed, like the UN Convention Against Corruption and the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. But the spokesperson declined to say whether China had successfully made any such requests.

With prime minister Tony Abbott struggling to fend off a leadership challenge, the odds are that the ratification of a politically contentious treaty with China is not likely to happen any time soon.

http://qz.com/340913/corrupt-chinese-officials-who-have-fled-to-australia-remain-out-of-beijings-reach/

18,000 Corrupt Officials Have Fled to Canada, Australia and the United States

While there is no public data on the number of corrupt officials that have fled China with their money and families, a report by MSN Money estimates anywhere from 4,000 to 18,000 of them have landed in Canada, Australia and the United States.

With so many corrupt officials taking off with China’s wealth, it’s difficult to know just how widespread the problem is. The government’s only comment on the issue was in October 2013, when prosecutor Zao Jianming acknowledged that there were 6,694 corrupt officials caught between 2008 and 2013.

Between 1992 and 2014, only 51 cases were made public: 21 were officials, 19 worked in state-owned enterprises, and 11 were in banking or related fields. The majority were accused of accepting bribes, misusing public funds, exploiting their position, laundering money, and other related white-collar crimes.

Although authorities insist that they are getting tougher on these fugitives, the central bank suggests increased monitoring in sensitive sectors, such as finance, or in any other field that includes a monopoly.

https://thenanfang.com/up-to-18000-corrupt-officials-have-fled-to-canada-austral
ia-and-the-united-states/

There is growing suspicion that the stabbing of Prabha Arun Kumar, the Indian IT consultant in Sydney, was a hate crime and not a simple case of mugging.

"Except her mobile phone, everything else is intact," Thrijesh Jaychandra, Prabha's relative told HT in Bengaluru on Monday.

The Sydney police, which is in constant touch with the family, has also conveyed to the family that they are probing the angle of racial bias being the motivation behind the crime.

Meanwhile, the husband of Prabha Arun Kumar has reached Sydney.

Kumar was on the phone talking to her husband when the attack took place -- just 300 metres from her home -- as she took a shortcut through Westmead's Parramatta Park, Sydney's western suburb, around 9.30pm on Saturday night.

"He stabbed me, darling," she told husband Arun Kumar, Sydney's The Daily Telegraph reported, as the conversation abruptly ended.

Kumar, a mother of the 9-year-old, had finished working a double shift at an IT company and was taking a shortcut home across Parramatta Park.

Her husband flew in to Sydney from Bengaluru to formally identify her body. Her daughter is yet to be told of her death.

The police released CCTV footage of Kumar walking home from Parramatta train station to find clues about the case.

"We are releasing (the CCTV tapes) in an effort to jog people's memories - someone who may have seen Prabha, somebody who may know Prahba - coming forward and providing us with the information that we need to work out why this has happened to her and who is responsible for it," homicide squad commander Michael Willing was quoted as saying by the daily.

Detective superintendent Willing said the footage did not appear to show anyone following the victim as she made her way home.

He said her husband talking with detectives about the conversation before she was killed.

"We have some detail in terms of their conversation," he said.

Police officers returned to the murder scene on Monday in a search for clues, a team of men scanning Amos Street that leads off the park.

Police have established a task force to investigate the murder but no arrests have so far been made.

Kumar, was set to return home next month after her working visa expired, after being sent to Sydney in 2012 to work for IT and outsourcing company Mindtree.

The company is based at The Rocks but Kumar had been working with a client at Rhodes when she caught the train home on Saturday, getting off at Parramatta Station about 9pm.

'Screams on phone'

Kumar's brother-in-law, Thrijesh Jayachandra, told The Hindu that she had told her husband that a man was following her.

"She was walking while talking to Arun on the phone when she said that a suspicious-looking man was following her," Jayachandra was quoted as saying by The Hindu.

"The next moment, he heard her scream for help and then plead with the man not to harm [her] and take all her belongings if he wanted. Seconds later, he heard her scream and say she was stabbed," he said.

"We received a call from someone from her office around 6:30 or so in the evening saying she was out of danger, but later in the evening we were informed by her brother Shankar, who lives in Perth, that she is no more."

Kumar, who was found by a passer by shortly afterwards, was treated at the scene and later died at Westmead Hospital. She had lost too much blood and doctors were unable to save her.

The victim's flatmate said Kumar had probably not wanted to bother anyone to ask for a lift home after finishing work late and arriving at Parramatta train station at 9pm.

Instead she decided to walk, and was attacked near a tree-lined walkway.

"Because she was working late regularly, she felt bad to ask for help," her flatmate, who asked to be identified as Sarada, told The Daily Telegraph.

"Maybe that is the reason she did not call."

Sarada said she had repeatedly warned her friend not to walk through the park after dark.

"I told her that it is not a safe way to come through because there are people that stop and ask you for money, like $2," she said.

"I don't know how I am going to face her husband. She is very close to her husband and her daughter. She talks to them every day, as soon as she finishes work she calls her husband and keeps talking. She has a good family."

Mindtree in a statement has called the incident extremely "unfortunate" and "shocking".
    
"Our prayers are with the family of the deceased. We are working with the officials of both the countries to help the family to bring the body back to India. We are providing all the necessary support to authorities investigating the case," it said.

A spate of violent crimes against Indian students in Australia in 2010, including the stabbing murder of 21-year-old Punjab man Nitin Garg as he walked to work at a fast-food restaurant in Melbourne, heightened tensions between Australia and India.

But since then the number of tourists visiting from India has picked up, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has described warmer relations between the nations as "natural" during a 2014 visit.

vikaryan wrote on Mar 10^th, 2015 at 10:39am:



Payvand - As an Iranian-American web site, we are especially focused on issues of importance to the Iranian communities abroad, and believe Iranian-Americans should play a bigger role in the social and political arena. We hope that our active coverage of the community’s achievements will strengthen us as a group and encourage activism.

Brian Ross wrote on Mar 8^th, 2015 at 5:06pm:



Did they teach you to tell people apart by the ideas they guide their lives by?

Racism in its cultural form is sustained by reified principles that constitute the dynamics of how the next generation should be programmed like its predecessors. A new set of conditioning mechanisms may be assembled to adapt to new exigencies, but the dynamics remain the same. There is in fact a preponderance of empirical evidence in history and current events to support the notion that racism is first and foremost a matter of culture and not of nature. The races are natural, but racism is fundamentally cultural. We saw this in South Africa during an apartheid era, which Palestine has likewise been going through for generations while being oppressed by Zionist Israel. 

Racism as a practice is not a monolithic challenge, but it is in most, if not all, instances coincidental with political, economic or social factors, or even a combination of any or all of these factors. This consideration further sustains the notion that racism is more cultural than natural. In the case of Nazi Germany, racism was coincident with an adversarial positioning against what was then perceived as being Jewish dominance in the economic affairs of Germany. In the United States, racial discrimination by European-Americans against African-Americans was more of a social-status issue, which had grown from an economic condition that spawned the mentality that the raison d’etre of black Americans in the US was to be “used as tools of economic production”. 



Ok /pol/, Is Racism Cultural or Natural?





Individualist European cultures tend to be more open to strangers than collectivist cultures such as Judaism. In this regard, it is interesting that developmental psychologists have found unusually intense fear reactions among Israeli infants in response to strangers, while the opposite pattern is found for infants from North Germany. The Israeli infants were much more likely to become 'inconsolably upset' in reaction to strangers, whereas the North German infants had relatively minor reactions to strangers. The Israeli babies therefore tended to have an unusual degree of stranger anxiety, while the North German babies were the opposite – findings that fit with the hypothesis that Europeans and Jews are on opposite ends of scales of xenophobia and ethnocentrism.



Most Women Are Racists

Women of all races exhibit strong same race preferences, while men of no race exhibit a statistically significant same race preference.

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/13/single-female-seeking-same-race-male/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Women care a lot more about race than men

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2008/07/why-does-race-matter-for-women/

Gendered Racial Exclusion

http://paa2008.princeton.edu/papers/80046

Racial Preferences in Dating

http://www.columbia.edu/~ss957/articles/Racial%20Preferences%20in%20Dating.pdf

Rules of attraction: Why white men marry Asian women and Asian men don’t marry white women

http://cholakovv.com/en/blog/2450

Congratulations to the Sydney Al-Nakba Planning Committee for successfully defying police and winning its case in the Supreme Court to be allowed to protest on Al-Nakba Day. The Supreme Court decision on May 14 sets an important precedent for future protest groups in Sydney when they come up against police opposition. The police will not be in a hurry to take a protest group to court again.

As a lawyer assisting the committee on the day, I was struck by how extreme police representations can be. NSW police told the court that the march route would take over an hour to complete (it took 25 minutes). One police officer said in an affidavit that he was fearful of drivers jumping out of cars and assaulting protesters. Another said that if the march went ahead, there was a real risk of “serious injury, even death”.

The Supreme Court emphasised the importance of free speech and public assembly, even if that comes at the cost of some commuters being inconvenienced “by minutes, if not hours”. It was a great example of how activists can take on the police and win.

A copy of the full judgment can be found at http://www.caselaw.nsw.gov.au/action/PJUDG?jgmtid=158562

Dale Mills,
Solicitor,
Waterloo, NSW

https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/51072