O Tempora, O Mores! (January, 2001)
American Renaissance, January 2001
In November, 2000, the 580 members of the Church of England’s governing synod met in Westminster and approved a recommendation from the Archbishops Council to combat “institutional racism” in the church. The church has set a goal of tripling the number of black and Asian clergy and bishops in the next ten years, and will send all archbishops, bishops, and synod members to sensitivity training. The Church of England does not have its own programs for this purpose and will patronize courses run by the more advanced Methodist Church. The report on “institutional racism,” met with no opposition during a two-hour discussion. [Victoria Combe, Call to Triple Number of Black and Asian Clergy, Telegraph (London), Nov. 17, 2000, p. 8.]
At the same meeting the divines were also offered free “homophobia awareness” classes by something called the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement. Movement members accuse the church of “institutional homophobia” and say church openings should be advertised in the homosexual press. They also want the church to approve liturgy for homosexual marriage and to participate in World Aids Day and in Coming Out Day. Official church reaction was not reported. [Victoria Combe, Churches Accused of Being Anti-Gay, Telegraph (London), Nov. 17, 2000, p. 8.]
The Rt. Rev. Colin Buchanan, Bishop of Woolwich, thinks he has the solution to the shortage of non-whites in the church hierarchy: “I think there is a need for white people on church boards and councils to stand down in favour of candidates from an ethnic background. I don’t think those people who have just been elected should be asked to stand down, rather, people who are coming towards the end of their term.” The Rev David Haslam, a leading adviser on race relations agrees: “There is a problem of under-representation nationwide which has to be addressed. I support the idea of white people stepping down. We need to educate people in positions of responsibility so that they can be encouraged to step aside.” Presumably these two worthies will lead by example and resign. The Archbishops of Canterbury (Primate of all England) and of York are among those scheduled for sensitivity training at the hands of the Methodists and they, too, will no doubt emerge from the experience eager to turn over their jobs to non-whites. [Chris Hastings and Jonathan Petre, Give Up Church Jobs for Blacks, Demands Bishop, Telegraph (London), Nov. 5, 2000.]
More British Breast-Beating
The British are in sack cloth and ashes over the death of Damilola Taylor, a 10-year-old Nigerian boy who was stabbed to death on Nov. 27 near a housing project in south London. Home Secretary Jack Straw has made a condolence visit to the boy’s school, Prime Minister Tony Blair has lamented the killing in the House of Commons and offered to visit the boy’s family, and the mayor of London calls the stabbing “an event of unique horror.” The boy was killed only three months after he arrived from Nigeria, and commentators have wondered what has gone wrong in British society to make London more violent and dangerous than Lagos. Reporters have been dispatched to Nigeria to look into the boy’s past, and his father is loudly calling for justice. No fewer than 40 detectives were assigned to a massive manhunt in a part of town where witnesses distrust the police and seldom cooperate.
Surely, the suspects must be white-but no! Three blacks were seen running away after the murder. Young Damilola had complained desperately to his father that West Indian blacks were tormenting him. Mrs. Lola Ayonrinde, a Nigerian and former mayor of Wandsworth, south London, says there is plenty of black-on-black violence but it is swept under the carpet:
Nigerian people are not popular in this area because they try to fit in and do well. The West Indian community likes to pretend there is racism everywhere and black people are being held back. Anyone who doesn’t subscribe to that point of view suddenly becomes a target. We have got to recognize that there is something called black-on-black racism. We may all have the same skin but that doesn’t mean there isn’t discrimination on the basis of the country of origin.
The country is in agony over all this but if enough blacks live in Britain for long enough, whites will stop feeling responsible for black mayhem.
In the meantime, Prime Minister Tony Blair thinks he has figured out how to get Britain back on track: revive patriotism! Michael Wills, an education minister whom he has appointed “patriotism envoy” will help knit the country back together. Apparently Mr. Wills has decided that openness, fair play, decency, and diligence are the quintessentially British qualities he will promote. Mr. Blair himself says, “few would disagree with the qualities that go towards British identity . . . qualities of creativity, built on tolerance, openness and adaptability, work and self-improvement, strong communities and families, fair play . . .” This listing of qualities is proof that Mr. Blair and Mr. Wills are, to put it delicately, fools. What they want is good behavior, and have confused it with patriotism. Patriotism is precisely what socialists and multi-cultists have been trying to destroy for years: the conviction that our people, our culture, our way of doing things are better simply because they are ours. Patriotism comes from a shared sense of history, destiny, and ancestry, which is the very thing the left hates. For socialists to pretend British “patriotism” will keep African teenagers in housing projects from stabbing each other to death is idiocy of startling proportions even for these benighted times. [Minette Marrin, A Sense of Patriotism Might Have Saved Damilola Taylor, Telegraph (London), Dec. 2, 2000.]
‘Cousin of Slavery’
Hess Yntema, a member of the City Council of Albuquerque, New Mexico, wants the city to declare itself “immigrant-friendly,” and to fund programs to help immigrants — both legal and illegal — get public services. He wants all newcomers to get education, housing, credit, and medical insurance, and wants the city to lobby Congress to overturn any restrictions on distribution of federal benefits to illegals. “I would describe our current immigration policy as a sanitized cousin of slavery,” he says. Mr. Yntema is white and is not an immigrant. [Oliver Uyttebrouck, Councilor Wants Immigrant Services, Albuquerque Journal, Nov. 2, 2000, p. D1.]
Preserving the Pupfish
The Pecos pupfish is native to the Pecos River, which runs through Texas and New Mexico. In just a few years it has gone from great abundance to near extinction because of the accidental introduction of a competing species known as sheepshead minnows. The minnows are commonly used as bait fish, and a fisherman dumped a bucket of them into the river some time in the early 1980s. Male minnows are more active and aggressive than pupfish males, and mate more successfully with pupfish females, and the resulting hybrids have driven pupfish out of all but a few isolated spots in the river. Public authorities have launched a crash program to save the pupfish, erecting fish barriers to keep minnows out of those places where pupfish can still be found, and banning the use of sheepshead minnows as bait in the rivers of Texas and New Mexico. Former habitat of the pupfish that has been damaged will be restored so the pupfish can be reintroduced. [Tania Soussan, Sexy Minnows May Endanger Pecos Pupfish, Albuquerque Journal, Oct. 20, 2000.]
Full Circle
Anglo American, the mining giant based in South Africa, had a leading role in developing copper mining in Zambia, back in the days when it was knows as Northern Rhodesia. After independence, Zambian authorities nationalized the mines and took over operations. Not surprisingly, annual production is down to 38 percent of the rate in the late 1960s, just before nationalization. Staff is bloated, equipment falls apart, suppliers are unpaid, and the mines lose an estimated $1 million a day. After 30 years of mismanagement, the Zambians got desperate and sought buyers for the failing operation. Anglo American has stepped in and bought back what was taken from it in 1970. The company is laying off thousands of workers, repairing equipment, and expects to be running a modest profit by the end of 2001. [Henri Cauvin, Hope for a Copper-Mining Renaissance in Zambia, New York Times, Nov. 10, 2000.]
Upstanding Citizens
In November, 2000, President Clinton signed a bill that relieves naturalized citizens of the obligation of taking the oath if they are too handicapped or mentally debilitated to do so. The first beneficiary of this law was Vijai Rajan of India, 25, who has cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, Crohn’s disease, cannot speak, and has the mental ability of a two-year-old. The immigrant from India was reportedly caught up in her family’s excitement during the naturalization ceremony, and giggled and smiled. Someone gave her a small American flag to hold, but her grip failed and she dropped it. [Woman’s Citizenship Oath Waived, Miami Herald, Nov. 22, 2000, p. 11A.]
A Policy for Everything
“Discrimination” law suits are on the rise. In 1999, 19,694 cases were filed with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, up 77 percent from 11,096 cases in 1992. Approximately 37 percent claimed racial discrimination, 31 percent sex discrimination, and nine percent claimed national origin discrimination.
“Sooner or later, virtually every medium-to-large sized company is likely to find itself the defendant in a discrimination or sexual harassment lawsuit,” says. Robert P. Hartwig, vice president of the Insurance Information Institute. “It is estimated that six out of 10 companies have been named in a discrimination or sexual harassment lawsuit in the past five years,” he adds. Mr. Hartwig even knows what the problem is. “The 21st century’s racially and ethnically diverse workforce is a potential powder keg,” he says, and America’s love of law suits is the spark that could set it off. For Mr. Hartwig, this is a business opportunity. He represents the industry that sells employment practices liability insurance, which pays off if a company is sued. There are now more than 60 companies that sell this kind of policy compared to just a handful when the business started in 1990. For a company with 200 employees, a typical $1 million policy with a $10,000 deductible costs between $10,000 and $20,000, depending on the industry. “For about $40 a day, a mid-sized company can protect itself against the ruinous impact that a discrimination lawsuit can have on a modest-sized business,” says Mr. Hartwig. [Is Your Business Prepared For a Discrimination Lawsuit? Anti-Discrimination Policies, Education, and Insurance Can Help, Says I.I.I., PRNewswire, Nov. 30, 2000.]
Scientific Self-Censorship
Australian Aborigines have long been famous for their ability to navigate the trackless wastes, to find water holes and locate animal lairs. Modern testing has shown that this is because they excel in what is called “visual memory.” On average, they perform about 50 percent better than whites when asked to recall what they saw in a room or picture. For 4,000 generations-about 80,000 years-Aborigines were hunter-gatherers in the harsh Australian interior, an environment that put a strong premium on remembering landmarks that could mean the differences between death and survival.
Now Clive Harper, a professor of pathology in Sidney, Australia, reports that the visual cortex, which processes visual information, is about 25 percent larger in Aborigines than in whites and has more nerve cells. He points out that no one really knows how the visual cortex works, but the difference in size suggests inherently superior spatial ability. However, racial differences in brain structure are a very unfashionable area of study, and Prof. Harper has been unable to publish his work in any scientific journal. Editors are “anxious that this was going to be seen as some form of discrimination,” says Prof. Harper. The organizers of a conference in the United States also refused to let him present his work. [Alasdair Palmer, The Difference, Sunday Telegraph (London), Nov. 19, 2000.]
It is easy to scorn the unwillingness of editors to deal with scientific fact, but their terror is easy to understand. Overall, the Aborigine brain is only about 85 percent the size of the European brain, and the skull is about twice as thick as in other races. Aborigines also have other morphological structures similar to those of distant, pre-sapiens ancestors, leading John Baker, late of Oxford University, to conclude in his book Race (p. 302): “Australids are exceptional in the number and variety of their primitive characters and in the degree to which some of them are manifested.” If, given their generally smaller brains, the Aborigine visual cortex is exceptionally large, this would mean other areas of the brain are correspondingly smaller. This would conform entirely with the low performance levels Aborigines show in other mental abilities-which is precisely what science editors are afraid to talk about.
News From South Africa
South Africa is developing the world’s premier child sex industry. Legal loopholes make it difficult to prosecute pedophiles and there is a ready supply of underage prostitutes. This, combined with high demand both from locals and tourists, has created an industry that has attracted organized crime from Angola, Bulgaria, Thailand, Hong Kong, and the Russian Mafia. Many parents are willing to sell children as young as four in what are the equivalent of sex-slave markets. Brothel operators are the usual buyers but many individuals are in the market, too. It is reportedly common to make the children do housework when they are not servicing their “masters.” By some estimates there are 38,000 child prostitutes in South Africa, with a high concentration in Cape Town. Demand is so high smugglers bring children in from Angola, Zimbabwe, and even Eastern Europe. Child prostitution was highlighted recently by wide publicity given to a woman from Mozambique who was stopping cars on a freeway off ramp, offering to rent out her daughters, aged seven and ten, for the equivalent of $26.00 a week. [Steven Swindells, Child Sex Trafficking on Rise in South Africa, Reuters, Nov. 23, 2000.]
But there has also been good news for the multi-racialists, who say former apartheid-supporters are coming over to the African National Congress. Robby Sutherland of Roodeplaat, 51, spent most of the past 25 years in conservative white politics, serving in Parliament for nine years as a member of the Afrikaner Herstigte Nasionale Party. Now he says he has had “an epiphany.” “I didn’t expect the ANC government to be so open-minded and let our white people join and be a part of them,” he says. “This is the most democratic party ever in South Africa and that moved me.” He has even run for political office as an ANC candidate, and shouts “power to the people” and “long live the ANC” in Zulu at campaign rallies.
Mr. Sutherland is not alone. Pik Botha, former foreign minister with the National Party, has joined the ANC. Late in 2000 there was much rejoicing when Craig Kotze, a former secret agent for the apartheid regime, announced at a news conference that he had “finally come home to the ANC.” He denies he is an opportunist and claims that he just “needed to get out of the ghettoes of my mind.” He says he wants to work as a bridge between the ANC and other Afrikaners. [Ravi Nessman, Reformed Right-Wing Racist Joins ANC, AP, Dec. 1, 2000.]
Meanwhile, more white farmers are being killed. In November, blacks strangled a 59-year-old woman on her chicken farm and shot and wounded a 82-year-old man who returning to his farm from church. Blacks have killed more than 1,000 farmers since 1996, which makes being a white commercial farmer the most dangerous job in the country. [Steven Swindells, South Africa Hit by New Rural Race Murders, Reuters, Nov. 20, 2000.]
World AIDS Figures
The United Nations estimates that at the end of 2000 36.1 million people carry the AIDS virus, and 5.3 million of them were infected during the year. Worldwide, the infection rate is 1.1 percent of the adult population, and about three million people are thought to have died of AIDS in 2000. Women account for 47 percent of the infected population.
In North America, about 920,000 people had the virus, with 150,000 infected during 2000. About 20,000 died during the year, and the adult infection rate is 0.6 percent. In black Africa there are 25.3 million people with the virus, and the adult infection rate is 8.8 percent. Some 2.4 million people are thought to have died of AIDS during the year. The area with the lowest adult infection rate is East Asia, with 0.07 percent. The rate for Australia/New Zealand is 0.13 percent and for Western Europe it is 0.24 percent. [Worldwide, Regional Impact of AIDS, AP, Nov. 28, 2000.]
‘A White a Day’
Three black girls who attend Bowie High School in Bowie, Maryland, face hate crime charges after they attacked a white boy at a bus stop. On October 6, they pushed him to the ground and punched and kicked him until a passerby stopped them. He says he heard one of the girls say she “hated white people” and was going to “pick on a different white person each day.” [Ellen Sorokin, Bowie High Students Accused in Assault, Washington Times, Oct. 26, 2000.]
Test Not ‘Racist’
Anyone who wants to teach in the public schools of California has to take the California Basic Educational Skills Test or CBEST. The test, which has been given since 1983, consists of two essays and 100 multiple choice questions in reading and math. Eighty percent of whites pass on the first try but only 53 percent of Asians, 49 percent of Hispanics, and 38 percent of blacks. In 1992, a group of non-whites filed suit, claiming the test was culturally biased, but on Oct. 30 a special 11-judge panel of the federal appeals court upheld the test as a fair assessment of the minimum qualifications for being a teacher. [Mandatory Test of Teacher Skills Upheld by Court, San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 31, 2000.]
No Allegiance
Chicago Alderman Bernard Stone thought it would be a nice patriotic gesture if every City Council session began with the Pledge of Allegiance. “It seemed to me to be a no-brainer, something that would be passed almost without discussion,” he said. He was wrong. Black members of the council object to the pledge because they say the final phrase, “with liberty and justice for all” is hypocritical because it does not include blacks. On Nov. 1, The council finally did vote to open meetings with the pledge, but several black members abstained. When the first recitation of the pledge took place, at least one black member remained outside the room. [Council Passes Proposal for Pledge, AP, Nov. 2, 2000.]
‘Very Good Kids’
A 13-year-old boy beat and raped a woman in Bronx, New York, while his twin brother held down the woman’s two-year-old son and covered his mouth to keep him from screaming. The twins were waiting for the 40-year-old woman outside her apartment, and attacked her as she returned from the grocery story. Afterward, they stole $375 in cash and ran away. The victim recognized the boys and gave police enough information to find them. The boy accused of the rape had scratches on his face from struggling with the woman. Police charged the twins as juveniles with rape, sexual assault, burglary, and robbery. Outside the courtroom their mother insisted they were innocent. “They said they didn’t touch no baby, and they didn’t touch no lady,” she said. “I’m mad as hell. They’re very good kids. They wouldn’t rape nobody.” Police report the boys have been in and out of foster care and were charged two years ago with raping a five-year-old cousin. [Murray Weiss, Zach Haberman and William Neuman, Cops Nab Twin Boys in Rape of Bx. Mom, Oct. 17, 2000, New York Post.]
African-Style Panty Raid
We reprint the following article, verbatim and in toto, from the London Guardian:
Three hundred Kenyan schoolboys tried to fight their way into a neighbouring co-educational school on Saturday night, allegedly in an attempt to rape the school’s 200 female boarders.
After a pitched battle with the girls and their male classmates lasting most of the night, the boys were dispersed when police arrived and fired shots over their heads. Thirty-four boys were yesterday arrested in connection with the attack, which apparently failed in its objective.
‘This raid was well organised,’ said a teacher at the besieged Ndururmo Mixed High School in Kenya’s Central Province, who wished to remain anonymous. ‘The invaders came dressed in our uniforms which they had stolen on Thursday night. We suspect they planned to rape the girls.’
Several dozen students were injured in the attack, which began when the boys gathered around the girls’ dormitory at 10 p.m., reportedly high on drink and drugs. Alerted by the girls’ screams as the intruders tried to force their way in, male pupils came running from their own dormitory to fight them off with broken-up chairs and other makeshift weapons.
Police called all 600 pupils of Nyahururu Boys High School, at the foot of Mt. Kenya, to an inspection yesterday morning. Any boy with fresh cuts or bruises was arrested. However, many of the schoolboys were thought to be hiding in nearby maize fields to escape arrest.
The incident is only the latest example of the violence currently plaguing Kenya’s schools. More than 100 pupil riots have been reported this year. In one recent incident, schoolboys set their matron’s house alight after she refused them access to their female classmates’ dormitory. In another, high school pupils attempted to burn their prefects alive, complaining that they were too strict. [James Astill, 300 Boys Attack Girls School, Guardian (London), Nov. 14, 2000.]
Blacks love to fantasize about being paid huge sums because of slavery, but until now the theory has been Congress would pass out the boodle. Now a group of experienced trial lawyers has announced they plan to file a civil suit on behalf of the descendants of slaves. Some of the lawyers have won big cases. Alexander J. Pires helped win a $1 billion settlement for black farmers who claimed discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Richard Scruggs won the $368.5 billion settlement for states against tobacco companies, and Dennis C. Sweet, won a $400 million settlement in the “phen-fen” diet drug case. Also in the group are O.J. Simpson defender Johnnie Cochran, black Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree, and Randall Robinson of TransAfrica (see the May, 2000, issue for a review of his miserable book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks).
“We will be seeking more than just monetary compensation,” says Prof. Ogletree. “We want a change in America. We want full recognition and a remedy of how slavery stigmatized, raped, murdered and exploited millions of Africans through no fault of their own.” He says the group has not yet decided in which court to sue nor who the defendants will be, but they will probably target federal and state governments, as well as private companies alleged to have profited from slavery. [Paul Shepard, Lawyers Plan Slave Reparations Suit, AP, Nov. 4, 2000.]
Spoils of War
Twenty-five years after the end of the Vietnam War, Vietnamese are still flocking to the United States. What was predicted to be a brief, small exodus in 1975 has ended up being a 1,000,000-man tidal wave, and the flow shows no sign of stopping. Most of the 26,000 or so immigrants who come every year cannot pretend they are escaping Communism. They are part of what the U.S. Consulate calls the “expanding pyramid” of family reunification: the children, spouses, parents, and siblings of people already here who will, in turn, bring in their own relatives. Many who leave now are women-brides of men who return to Vietnam to marry their own kind. Vietnamese in America send an estimated $2 billion a year back home, about twice as much as the country gets in foreign aid from all sources. Vietnam has also become one of the main adoption markets for childless Americans, who brought home 717 children in the last year.
“It’s going to outlive us all,” says Courtland Robinson, an expert on Vietnamese migration. “I don’t think anyone in 1975 thought it would last more than a few months or a few years. But here we are, all these years later, seeing not just the last vestiges but a new manifestation of this migration.” [Seth Mydans, 25 Years Later, Vietnamese Still Flock to the U.S., New York Times, Nov. 7, 2000.]
Hispanics feel less inclined to adapt to mainstream America. According to a Yankelovich study called 2000 Hispanic Monitor, 69 percent of Hispanics say Spanish is more important to them than it was five years ago. In 1997, the figure was 63 percent. In 1997, 72 percent of Hispanics said they were concerned about fitting in to American society, but three years later the figure was down to 64 percent. Likewise, the number who say they are concerned with finding acceptance from non-Hispanics has dropped from 77 percent to 68 percent. [Lee Romney, Latinos in U.S. Increasingly Favoring Spanish, Los Angeles Times, Nov. 8, 2000.]
Joseph Abdullah, whose mother is German and father Iraqi, drowned in a swimming pool in 1997 in the small German town of Sebnitz. In 1998 local authorities judged the death a swimming accident, but in 2000 fresh witnesses stepped forward to claim anti-miscegenist skinheads had drugged Joseph and held him under water. All of Germany, which has been in paroxysms of remorse over a series of recent racial incidents-some real, others alleged-worked itself into certifiable hysteria at the news. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder set the tone by visiting the boys’ parents and issuing ringing denunciations of skinhead barbarity. The parents claimed to have gotten death threats. A massive police effort swung into action, and three young Germans were arrested. Now, it appears that Mr. and Mrs. Abdullah paid the new witnesses (race unspecified) the equivalent of about ten dollars each to claim to have seen things they did not see, and that the alibis of the suspects turned out to be unshakable. The prosecutor concluded that “grounds for suspicion against the three suspects cannot be supported” and released them. It has not been reported whether charges will be brought against the Abdullahs. [Adam Tanner, Suspects in German Boy Death Freed, Reuters, Nov. 27, 2000.]
Took in by ‘Big Took’
Stanley Williams is a co-founder of the black Crips gang, which he helped establish in 1971 in order to fight rivals. The other founder, Raymond Washington, was shot to death in 1979. In 1981, Mr. Williams, or “Big Took” as he was known to his pals, got the death penalty for killing four people. During 19 years of appeals, he has taken to writing children’s books, eight of which have appeared since 1996. They are supposed to warn “at risk youth” of the perils of crime, but critics say they glamorize the very things they warn against. He is also involved in something called the Internet Project for Street Peace, through which yet more “at risk youth” in California and South Africa use e-mail and chat rooms to “share experiences.”
As it happens, an admirer of Mr. Williams extended the activities of the Internet Project for Street Peace to Switzerland, where there are reportedly “at risk” Somalis, who have greatly benefited from “sharing experiences” with Californians and South Africans. Mario Fehr, a member of the Swiss Parliament, is so impressed with Mr. Williams’ good works he has nominated the death-row killer for the Nobel Peace Prize (members of any nation’s parliament can offer nominations). Mr. Fehr knows about the murders but says, “Everyone can change his life, no matter what mistakes someone has done.” [Ron Harris, Inmate Nominated for Nobel Prize, AP, Nov. 18, 2000.]
Stirrings in Romania
By the time this issue of AR is distributed, Romania will have held its runoff election for president. In the Nov. 26 ballot the usual people were in a swivet over the second-place finish of Corneliu Vadim Tudor, leader of the Greater Romania Party. He finished with 28 percent of the vote, and forced ex-Communist Ion Iliescu into a runoff by keeping him from getting a majority.
A victory by Mr. Tudor is unlikely, but it would be hugely significant. He takes the quaint view that Romania should be Romanian, a position that has broad appeal to people who feel hemmed in by increasing numbers of Turks, Hungarians, and other Slavs. Romanian is a Romance language, and Romanians feel much more akin to their Western than to their Eastern neighbors. Mr. Tudor has also struck a chord with voters by promising to clamp down on Gypsies and on the widespread corruption that has followed the fall of Communism.
Mr. Tudor came up through the Communist ranks and had the unofficial position of court poet for the last Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Only months after Ceausescu was executed in 1989, Mr. Tudor established the Greater Romania Party, whose name does not stand for territorial enlargement but for improving the country. He won a seat in the Senate in 1992 and got five percent of the presidential vote in 1996. A man who can quote Byron and who also expresses earthy colloquialism with perfect grammar, Mr. Tudor likes to wear sun glasses and white suits. White, he explains, is the color of truth, and points out that Jesus Christ is always depicted wearing white. For the campaign, however, he has worn dark suits without sun glasses.
Romania has been “Westernized” to the point that Mr. Tudor has no media support. Every paper either ridicules or ignores him. Poll-takers have stopped publishing results for fear of giving him encouragement. His opponent Mr. Iliescu refuses to debate him and television stations will not let him in the studio. It is a perfect sign of our times that Western Europe is far more worried at the prospect of victory by a nationalist than by an ex-Communist whose conversion to markets and ballots is widely recognized to be only halfhearted. [Alison Mutler, Romania’s Tudor Frightens Many, AP, Dec. 5, 2000.]
Stephen and Chinlin Leung, immigrants to New York from Hong Kong, disapproved of their 17-year-old daughter Connie’s choice of boyfriend. The girl had been dating 20-year-old Eric Louissant, who is black, and the parents strongly disapproved. So Connie and Eric decided to kill Connie’s parents. They strangled Mr. Leung with a belt while he was watching television, waited three hours for Mrs. Leung to come home, and strangled her, too. They kept the bodies in the Leung’s Manhattan apartment for several days before dumping them in the East River. Connie is a minor and can get no more than 25 years in jail. Boyfriend Eric could face the death penalty. [N.Y. Interracial Lovers Accused of Killing Parents, Reuters, Nov. 17, 2000.]
