Boyo

The juxtaposition of three stories in the UK news section of the Indy shows that Britain has its priorities well and truly straight; it 1) deported a mother and her 4 children to Malawi, despite protests from their neighbors, 2) is about to deport Iraqis back to the, you know, safe parts of Iraq, despite protests by the UN High Commissioner on Refugees, 3) fined a local councillor in South Lanarkshire (Scotland) £750 for a “racially aggravated breach of the peace” for calling a Welshman “boyo.”

Home Secretary Charles Clarke reacted to the UN criticism of his plan to deport any wogs foreigners for a long list of “unacceptable behaviours” by accusing the UN of coddling terrorists: “The human rights of those people who were blown up on the Tube in London on July 7, are, to be quite frank, more important than the human rights on the people who committed those acts.” Clarke gets it entirely wrong in a way that demonstrates his failure to understand the concept of human rights, which is worrying but not uncommon in a home secretary. Human rights are by definition rights which accrue to humans. Those of some humans are not less important than those of other humans, because all humans are in fact human. Stop me if this is too fucking complicated.

The Times says “The Home Office says that Muslim leaders helped them to identify these undesirables, but officials refuse to name the Islamic groups involved.” The largest Muslim groups deny having named names. What the HO is doing here, claiming Muslims are finking for them but we can’t say who, is a blatant, indeed astoundingly blatant, divide-and-conquer tactic to make Muslims suspicious of each other. And its blatancy won’t make it less effective.

A member of Thailand’s cabinet, a woman involved in a lawsuit has disclosed, had silicone injected into his penis. But which one? Which member, not which penis. Oh dear, I said member, didn’t I?

A library in the Netherlands will start loaning out human beings. You can check out a homosexual (so to speak), a Gypsy, a drug addict, etc, and ask them about their lives for an hour.

And from the Guardian: “Belarus retaliated against Lithuania’s decision to build a radioactive waste dump close to their shared border by announcing plans to put two giant pig farms in sniffing distance of its neighbour.”