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Subject: "Walk the Line"
Walking the Line Once More
[At the Golden Globe Awards Monday night, the two stars of "Walk the Line", Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, walked away with statuettes, their odds of copping Academy Award nominations, and indeed the coveted award itself, just got much better. The Globes, awarded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, have long been viewed as a forecaster of the Oscar race. With that in mind, and with Matthew Wanniski at the Sundance Film Festival this week, it seemed appropriate to repost his review of the Johnny Cash biopic. The nominees will be announced on January 31, 2006. Stay tuned. PKW]
November 23, 2005
Memo to: Website moviegoers
From: Matthew Wanniski
Re: Phoenix and Witherspoon Burn Up the Screen
The role of the flawed hero is a common one throughout history. Such characters intrigue us with their imperfections and inspire us by their willfulness and noble endurance in the face of hardship. Their stories move us and become part of us, because they are us and we are them. Somewhere, below the surface, there is a kinship.
We don't need to delve too deeply into the life of Johnny Cash to find common ground with the late legendary country music icon. Though it provides a small glimpse into his life, the extraordinary new film "Walk the Line," easily conveys the connections between us, providing an intensely passionate and tumultuous, revelatory and reverential look at his rise to fame in the late 1950s. It is this year's "Ray," a sure-fire Oscar contender.
The film features a career-defining and nuanced performance by Joaquin Phoenix, who was specifically chosen by Johnny himself. Phoenix brilliantly depicts the troubled, stubborn, and brilliant man as if he'd actually walked a mile in his shoes. Like Jamie Foxx's approach to Ray Charles, he truly embodies the spirit of his subject. He does his own singing and guitar playing (and does both remarkably well), but it's not the timbre of his voice that makes the spell work but the fact that he appears to believe every word he says and every note he sings. He gives form, but more importantly, he gives soul to the role, so effortlessly expressing the late singer's hopes, fears, and dreams. Such authenticity in a performance is rare.
The earnestness and optimism of youth in the 1950s forms a vibrant backdrop to the first half of the film (the pace noticeably slackens in the second half). In the scene where Johnny is touring with some of the hottest musicians of the day, such as Elvis and Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis (played by Waylon Malloy Payne) announces that they're all going to hell for a song, he's speaking of how he and Johnny and the others—and us, too—go in search for our own heaven but the routes we take to get there can lead us along some pretty low roads. We can only walk our own line, yet others may look down on us and see hell as our final destination, oblivious to the fact that their "high road" may be even lower than our low road.
James Mangold's exceptional direction, bolstered by a wonderful script by Gill Dennis, also contributes to bringing to life Johnny's heroic and uniquely American saga. He's not a ready-made, conventional hero, though, and the film does well by revealing how frustrating an individual he was because of his refusal to play by anyone else's rules. It's difficult to watch how he mistreated his first wife Vivian (infused with tragic dignity by Ginnifer Goodwin), neglected his children, and nearly lost himself to an addiction to drugs and alcohol. We get angry and frustrated with him, but we sympathize, too, because at its heart the film is a love story. It is his intense, obsessive, life-long and thoroughly helpless love for June Carter (Reese Witherspoon) that fueled his fire. It was she who actually penned the song "Ring of Fire," with its line "the taste of love is sweet." But no matter how sweet it couldn't stop either of them from being burned by it. Yet he never gave up trying to reach her. Call it courage or foolishness, we must salute such Herculean persistence.
In the charming role of June, Witherspoon absolutely shines, easily standing toe-to-toe with Phoenix and delivering an extraordinarily vigorous performance. She, too, sings her heart out, bringing to vivid life June's energy and bright spirit. Their scenes together are almost epic, and their chemistry so evident it's as if we're watching the real Johnny and June. Though sparks fly when they speak to each other, it's what they don't say and do when they're together that carries the greater weight.
It's not just love, though, but psychology that drove them. Like Johnny, June was told she wasn't good enough to succeed, so she set out to prove them wrong. In Johnny's case, it was the death of his older brother Jack while he was still a child and his father's lament that the wrong child died that left a particularly lasting impression on him, fueling a desperate desire to prove himself to the world. It is a poignant but profoundly simple point, for aren't we all out to prove something to someone, first and foremost ourselves? We know full well the severe consequences that his determination to make it in the music business will have on his marriage, his friendships, and his health. We cannot condone his actions, and we grow angry and frustrated by his self-destructive behavior, as if we have a stake in the outcome—and we do.
The music, provided by T Bone Burnett ("Cold Mountain," "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?"), is infectious and toe-tapping, and while we don't learn exactly how he developed his signature sound nor from where his dark and gritty lyrics sprang, what we do get is boisterous and raw, a true reflection of his era. He remains as Bob Dylan called him: "what the land and country is all about, the heart and soul of it personified."
Rated PG-13 for some language, thematic material and depiction of drug dependency.
Here.
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Subject: jews destroy the competition
Study: Most college students lack skills
By BEN FELLER
WASHINGTON -- More than half of students at four-year colleges - and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges - lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.
The literacy study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the first to target the skills of graduating students, finds that students fail to lock in key skills - no matter their field of study.
Here.
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Subject: interview with jew-erasers
Terror leader revels in killing Israeli civilians
Aaron Klein talks to Brigades chief about Tel Aviv suicide bombing
By Aaron Klein
Following is a WorldNetDaily exclusive interview with Abu Jihad, northern West Bank chief for the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the terror group that sent a suicide bomber yesterday to kill Israelis in Tel Aviv.
Bomber Sami Antar, 20, a resident of the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, blew himself up in a small restaurant in the southern section of the city near the main Tel Aviv bus station. Most of the 22 injured were diners eating outdoors at the shop's sidewalk seating area.
The Islamic Jihad terror group claimed responsibility for the bombing, but WND was first to report the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the declared military wing of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party, was behind the blast.
Here, Abu Jihad talks about his group's involvement in the attack, the mindset of yesterday's suicide bomber and the likelihood of future attacks.
Arabic-English translation by Ali Waked.
WND: Palestinian and Israeli security officials say Islamic Jihad doesn't have a major cell in the Balata refugee camp. I have been there many times. Your group dominates the camp. Clearly, if the bomber came from Balata, he was likely a member of the Fatah Party's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Is this accurate?
ABU JIHAD: We felicitated our brothers in the Islamic Jihad for this heroic attack. We do not feel any sorrow or shame to admit that in [yesterday's] attack and many other operations exist a very high level of cooperation, coordination and collaboration. But allow me please not to give any operational details to you for security reasons. When I said that the collaboration is at all levels, one should understand what I mean. Our relations with the leadership of Islamic Jihad are perfect, a very warm relation of brothers and fighters in the resistance, and again, I felicitated them in this heroic and blessed attack.
Here.
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Subject: fear of the flag
More than 150 students at William Blount High School have signed a petition seeking support for the right to wear confederate symbols on shirts and other clothing items.
But students who wore the emblem on Friday say they were threatened with suspension if they didn't cover up.
Some students say they support the right to express their confederate heritage that the school has taken away.
Many students came to school on Friday wearing a confederate symbol but say school officials then threatened them.
"If we didn't they said that they were going to suspend us, but my friend Bruce, they threatened my friend Bruce that if he didn't turn his shirt inside out, they were going to take him to juvenile," says Derek Barr, who started the flag petition. Barr says he hopes to seek more signatures for his petition but says he's concerned about retaliation from school officials. Attempts to contact Principal Steve Lafon or Superintendent Alvin Hord were unsuccessful. The policy may be facing legal action, local Sons of Confederates Camp Commander Ron Jones says they will be assisting the students should a suit be filed against the school system.
Here.
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Subject: why blame niggers when you can blame guns?
Gun violence is opening up racial divide
Racist using the violence to further their goals
Ethan Baron, canada.com
Canada's gangsters are giving ammunition to racists at home and south of the border. Every gang shooting provides new fodder for white supremacists, new "examples" to help advance their cause, new reasons to keep people of certain colours out of this country, and the U.S.
When the innocent are caught in the crossfire, as recently happened in Toronto and Vancouver, the racist, anti-immigrant venom spews forth with a self-righteous tone. For hate groups, gang violence in Canada proves multiculturalism doesn't work.
"Hasn't Canada learned anything from the United States?" bleated one outraged white man on the website for the U.S. racist group American Renaissance.
"If you take a white population and infuse it with non-whites from violent cultures, guess what? You destroy the nation."
He was responding to news of a shooting and series of stabbings among rival youths of Vietnamese and Filipino descents in the Vancouver region last year.
Then "Margaret" chimed in, gloating.
"For how many years have the Canadians sneered and felt oh so superior to the US because of our own racial problems?
"Canada is getting exactly what it deserves."
It's not just gang violence in Vancouver. It's gang violence in Winnipeg, in Toronto, that has thrown fuel on the fires of hate.
Ontario construction worker Brad Love received a jail sentence in 2003, and again in 2005 for sending hate-filled letters to prominent citizens. He was put away again in November after allegedly breaching his probation by writing letters to an Etobicoke, Ont. community newspaper. With help from prominent Canadian white supremacist Paul Fromm, Love overcame his incarceration in Maplehurst Detention Centre in Milton, Ont., and reached out to media by e-mail in early January.
"Toronto has 56 murders per year," Love wrote. "Jamaica has 1,450. Thus, do not let such violent people come here . . . it's all mathematics."
"I'm not a genius," Love noted, in what ranks as one of the world's greatest understatements.
In Winnipeg, the October gang-crossfire death of Philippe Haiart, 17, drew prompt response from American Renaissance supporters.
"Canada is a great racial petri dish for study," said one would-be bio-political scientist. "Not having had slavery and historically having only small pockets of minorities, the Great 'White' North should be studied for it's [sic] increasing failure to make multiCULTuralism work."
In Toronto, Jane Creba, 15, was killed by a gang-banger's stray bullet on Boxing Day. Fans of the rabidly racist U.S. website New Nation News jumped all over the shooting, throwing around the N word and making reference to Planet of the Apes.
In Vancouver, some 100 young Indo-Canadian men have died since 1990 in gang- and drug-related violence. The bloody warfare spilled over in October, when suburban Vancouverite Laurie Tinga, 40, took a gangster's ricochet bullet in the head while she was watching TV at home. She suffered serious brain damage. Her shooting spawned a storm of racist vitriol on the normally tame Discover Vancouver forum.
"Canada belongs to the white race, so why are white people allowing these east indians to come here?" queried Mr. Truth.
Sadly, the media has played into the white supremacists' hands. In general, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio broadcasters don't mention race in connection with crime. It's accepted practice, to avoid harming ethnic communities and fueling racism. The media has broken that rule, judging that there's a bigger story than a series of gang shootings and stabbings - it's a community problem, and solutions will have to come, in part, from the community. It has become accepted practice to identify a suspect by ethnic origin, when it appears the violence is gang-related.
The media spotlight has provoked some positive response from families, community leaders and government. But making available that particular information, the colour of the gunman's skin, comes at a cost, and opens up Canada's cherished cultural mosaic to attack.
Here.
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Subject: coated with Hmong
The Last Place on Earth
by Paul Demko + photos by Jayme Halbritter
CHUE YANG ARRIVED IN THE UNITED STATES in July 2004. The 40-year-old married father of six initially settled his family in Atlanta with the help of his wife's relatives. He had spent the prior 26 years living in Hmong refugee camps in Thailand. Yang had little work experience, had never driven a car, and could speak almost no English.
Last January, Yang and his family relocated to Minnesota, where the bulk of his relatives live. The eight-person family moved into a two-bedroom apartment in north Minneapolis that cost $665 a month, not including utilities. With no one in the household working, and just a welfare check to support them, the bills quickly piled up. Yang says that he borrowed at least $3,000 from relatives to feed and shelter his family.
Finally in August, unable to keep up with his bills, Yang moved his family to Mary's Place, a homeless shelter in north Minneapolis, just off Olson Highway. The family now shares a two-bedroom apartment in the 92-unit facility. "I just need a place to save some money and pay off my bills," Yang says on a recent weekday afternoon, speaking through a translator at Mary's Place. He wears a white dress shirt and black pants that are too big for his stocky, barely five-foot frame. "We're happy to be here. When we came from Thailand we didn't have anything."
Yang has recently secured a job, working 30 hours a week as a janitor for $8 an hour. "It's a job," he responds when asked how he likes the work. But he's uncertain when—or if—he'll have the financial resources to move his family into their own residence.
Here.
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Subject: if there's niggers there, it ain't school
School segregation growing in California, study finds
By Lisa M. Krieger
California's schools are among the most segregated in the nation -- and they are becoming even more divided, with Latino and African-American students clustered together and isolated from whites, according to a study released this week by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University.
This trend -- driven by economic, policy and demographic changes within the state -- compounds the disadvantages of Latino and black students. And white students miss an important lesson about life in a diverse society, the researchers conclude.
``Segregation is growing in degree and complexity as the nation becomes increasingly multiracial,'' said Gary Orfield, lead author of the report and director of the project. ``We have to get away from thinking of segregation as something that came out of the Old South -- and think about how it's happening in the new California.''
The findings hold true even in diverse Silicon Valley. In the San Jose Unified School District, the average black student in 1991 went to a school with 40 percent white students and 40 percent Latino students. By 2003, that changed to 28 percent white students and 50 percent Latinos.
In general, the study said, schools with high concentrations of blacks and Latinos have less-qualified teachers, lower levels of student competition, more limited curriculum, more serious health problems and a higher dropout rate. There are fewer fluent native speakers of standard English, a skill that's essential in college.
The Harvard researchers studied the changing patterns of racial composition in the nation's schools in regions, states and districts by using data from 1968 until 2003-04 from the U.S. Department of Education.
They found that in 2003, the average Latino student in the state attended a school with 19 percent white students, down from about 50 percent in 1970. The average black student in California attended a school with 22 percent white students in 2003, down from 26 percent in 1970.
Asian-Americans are the most integrated racial group. Even when they are in predominantly minority schools, they are seldom in schools overwhelmingly Asian, and are unlikely to have the kind of ``linguistic segregation'' that affects Latino students, the study found.
Here.
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Subject: niggers be overheating an' shit
Global Warming Could Spell Disaster for Blacks
By Bruce Britt
Posted Jan. 18, 2006 - If you thought Hurricane Katrina was a once-in-a-lifetime fluke, think again. Concerned environmentalists say that unless the United States gets real about the threat of global warming, African Americans and other people of color can expect a repeat of disasters like Katrina.
"When you look at the trends and put them all together, it's undisputable that the sea levels are rising," says Ansje Miller, director of the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative (EJCC). "Warmer seas mean more intense hurricanes.... You're going to have intense flooding like we have never seen before. Katrina is really the hurricane of the future."
Here.
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Subject: giving in to violent nogs/France
The Great Train Razzia
By Nidra Poller
Paris 5 January 2006 -- French opinion makers are against the clash of civilizations the same way they are against the war in Iraq: fervently sure of their own moral superiority. But reality has a way of its own, and the Great Train Razzia that rang in the New Year on the Côte d'Azur is a smashing illustration of the clash of civilizations.
One hundred drunk and disorderly "youths" from the "sensitive neighborhoods" outside of Marseille were let loose in a train carrying revelers from Nice to Lyon via Marseille. They vandalized the train, terrorized the passengers, stole from them, sexually assaulted several young women, made convincing death threats and, when all these wicked deeds were done, pulled the emergency brake and jumped the train on the outskirts of Marseille.
It took several days for the story to break. Apparently management of the state-owned SNCF railway system and local police officials thought they could avoid bad publicity by keeping the information to themselves. Even more surprising: no local journalist scooped the story, no eyewitnesses came forward to reveal it, the media blissfully announced that New Year's Eve had been surprisingly calm -- only 425 cars torched and 13 gendarmes injured -- that the state of emergency was lifted.
The news broke on the 4th: 600 passengers returning at dawn from Nice to Lyon were terrorized for three hours by a gang of "youths." As the bare details filtered through several layers of protective screening, it became clear that a major clash of civilizations...in fact a head on crash of civilizations had taken place on the 1st day of the year 2006. Joyful partygoers on the star-studded Riviera were delivered into the hands of a hundred drunken marauders.
Every official involved in the incident behaved stupidly, no one communicated, no one took responsibility, and the result would be comical if it were not so ominous. The train was not hermetically sealed. The conductor's cabin was not occupied by terrorists armed with box cutters. There are all sorts of stations between Nice and Marseille. Though the hoodlums stole cell phones, several hundred remained in the hands of their owners. And the ordeal went on for hours.
Here, as far as one can gather without having been in the train, is what happened:
Police shoved a hundred drunken rowdies into regional train N° 17430 that was carrying 600 passengers home at dawn on the 1st of January. The SNCF had been running a promotional New Year's Eve fare of 1€20 since 2001. The idea was to save lives by discouraging people from driving after partying all night. Civilized idea, n'est-ce pas? For the rest of the voyage, imagine a 1950s French comedy on the Riviera combined with a slapstick version of a medieval jihad raid. Now think of the train chugging its way along a breathtakingly beautiful coastline, and crossing approximately 20 frontiers in the space of three hours. Yes, France without Borders is cross-hatched into a muddle of intersecting administrations governed by a bevy of chiefs, préfets, commanders, divisionary commissioners, and assorted petty officials whose indecisions outweigh their decisions.
The four SNCF security agents who boarded the train at 6:30, seeing nothing amiss, got off at St. Raphaël at 6:50. And the rambunctious young people immediately started roughing up passengers, stealing from them, threatening to kill them if they resisted or tattled. They took possession of a first class car, ripped up the curtains, bashed the seats, vomited and who knows what else. Cultural difference, if you see what I mean. For a civilized traveler, first class means greater comfort for a higher price. For the marauders it means épater la bourgeoise, or more precisely vomit on them.
At approximately 7:30 AM, the conductor decided that the train was no longer safe and stopped at les Arcs. Employees have the right to lay down their tools and walk off the job if their safety is endangered. According to some accounts the gendarmes were waiting on the platform, others claim it took them half an hour or more to arrive. One gendarme describes "prostrate passengers who didn't dare intervene." Little by little the gendarmes fanned out through the 10 cars of the train, "without confronting the troublemakers." The train was immobilized for an hour-and-a-half, the gendarmes tried to encourage passengers to file complaints, but for some reason didn't get much of a response. A few passengers fled the train. Including one young woman who had been sexually assaulted. When she resumed her voyage on a later train with a higher fare, the conductor made her pay the difference. Bonk! Clash of civilizations. A law-abiding young woman, victim of the traditional jihad treatment of conquered peoples, is expected to pay the correct fare. A horde of wild bandidos is allowed to run riot up and down the train. And when a handful, a tiny handful are caught, the judge sets most of them free.
Except for Aziz Ed Doubia of Moroccan origin and a repeat offender named Ashraf Bouzizoua; they are in prison awaiting trial. The train pulled out of Les Arcs, under a light guard of fifteen gendarmes, who got off in Toulon as three policemen got on but for some strange reason were not able to curtail the razzia. As the train reached the outskirts of Marseille, the junior jihadis pulled the emergency brake, jumped the train, turned around and bashed and stoned it, and then scattered to their just abodes, there to sleep off a most exciting New Year's Eve escapade.
It is easy to understand why the "youths" preferred to leave before the train pulled into the station, but who can understand why the passengers didn't flee while it was docked at Les Arcs? Were they too terrified to try to escape? Did they think the "youths" would catch them and slit their throats? They did promise to bleed (meaning in fact to slaughter) anyone who dared denounce them. Or were the passengers so dhimmified that they considered their punishment to be justified? Or normal?
It could have been worse. That's the buzzphrase here in France. The riots weren't all that bad, no one was killed. Well, in fact about eight people were killed, not counting the two kids whose accidental deaths were the provocative incident that set off the junior intifada...but who's counting?
Why did officials allow the train to pursue its course after the stop at Arcs-Draguignan? Procureur Christian Girard explains: "It seemed rather tricky to make all those youths leave the train because most of them had done nothing but minor vandalism and the other passengers were in a rush to get going again." An official at SNCF headquarters put it another way: if the train was allowed to run it means everything was under control. Logical, n'est-ce pas?
Interior Minister Sarkozy, who was not informed until three days after the fact, is promising stringent measures, an end to impunity, minors will be treated like majors when they commit major offenses, and the special railroad police force will be extended to the entire network. And, says the straightforward Minister, the troublemakers are not "youths" they are "voyous," hooligans.
Socialist party leader François Hollande, in a rare call for law and order, took the Minister to task for not controlling the situation with a firm hand and accused the government of covering up the real extent of New Year's Eve violence. For a party that has been actively cultivating the hooligan vote, this was an astonishing breakthrough.
But the prize for lucidity goes to a real youth, a 17 year-old from Draguignan named Habib. He was accosted by those hooligans on his way to Nice with some friends on the afternoon of the 31st. "They were Arabs. We tried to defend ourselves but they said they had 47 guys with them.... They said they were going to go on the rampage (‘hala' in Arabic), they were going to make a massacre on New Year's Day.... They pushed around some guys, and then they went after the girls. They would rub their own sex and then smear the girl's face. They threatened us with teargas bombs....They said they had knives. The way it looked to me, they were organized.....The next day we waited until the afternoon train. We didn't want to meet up with them again."
Ah bon? So it didn't all start at the break of dawn?
In fact, the police first met up with the Barbary pirates when they sailed into Nice on New Year's Eve, already drunk and disorderly. The police patted them down, took mug shots, held the most dangerous ones under arrest for the night, and kept tabs on the others so they wouldn't get into trouble. Then, making sure the kids calmed down, they escorted them to train N° 17430.
And that's how the Arabs whose behavior shocked and frightened Habib turned into youths. And that's how the hooligans who wreaked havoc from one end to the other of a ten-car train calmed down and became youths whenever a railroad security guard or gendarme approached gingerly and ducked out in a flash. And that's how the vandals who made grown men tremble turn into youths when they walk into a courtroom, and get released.
And don't forget, there was nothing religious about this whole operation, because good Muslims don't drink. But just pick up a copy of The Legacy of Jihad,* open to any page, and you will find a vivid description of the razzia mentality that permeates these two-bit conquering hordes. One commentator remarked with surprise that the troublemakers swept down on their hapless victims from their bastion in Marseille, which stayed calm during the flaming uprising of November. The inside story is that drug dealers and other black marketers had given strict orders: no funny business. They didn't want the police invading their citadel.
So it's only normal that the kids break out for a little fun on New Year's Eve. In fact, it's a tradition. Every year the SNCF does its 1€20 promotion, and every year the budding barbarians tear up the train. Not to worry. Every year the fares go up. And the dhimmis pay the damages.
* Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus Books
Here.
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Subject: border crime
Federal officials say Border Patrol and other federal agents working chronic drug-smuggling routes along the U.S. boundary with Mexico could be targets for retaliation by well-armed cartels from south of the Rio Grande, after a new enforcement push has dramatically curbed the importation of contraband.
"I do think we have to be prepared for the fact that as we press hard on these criminal organizations, some of them will want to fight back," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters earlier this week.
Admitting there had already been an "uptick in violence" against federal officers in recent months because of increased anti-smuggling operations, Chertoff said agents were not only targeting drug rings but also human smugglers as well. Despite the threats of retaliation, however, Chertoff insisted: "We want to make it very clear that ... will not cause us to back off" the current enforcement push.
As the Mexican drug and smuggling wars become increasingly violent, they are more frequently spilling across the border into the United States. Hundreds of people have been killed and wounded in the violence, especially near cities like Laredo, Texas and its Mexican sister city, Nuevo Laredo, right across the border.
Chertoff warned the situation was especially volatile for civilians.
"When civilians go down to the border, they are taking a huge chance with their own lives," he said.
The DHS chief also would not elaborate on reports some of the cartels could be preparing contract-style hits against federal agents, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported. But rumors that Mexican-based drug cartels have offered rewards for the killing of American federal agents have surfaced in the past.
A week ago the Associated Press reported that a confidential memo from federal officials warned Border Patrol agents they could be the targets of assassins hired by the smugglers of illegal aliens.
Here.
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Subject: asinine Christians, saving valueless savages
Famed missionary martyrdom ultimately saved the assailants' tribe
RICHARD N. OSTLING
Associated Press
NEW YORK - Far from home, five American missionaries died in brutal fashion: speared and hacked to death by tribesman in the dense jungles of Ecuador.
That nightmare moment 50 years ago this month evolved into a remarkable example of reconciliation, and one of the most influential incidents in 20th century Protestant mission lore.
Now the saga is being retold in "End of the Spear," a moving feature film about redemption in the jungle with a bigger budget ($17 million) and broader release (in 1,200 commercial cinemas this weekend) than many films of this genre.
In January 1956, Bush pilot Nate Saint and American colleagues Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully and Roger Youderian had teamed up in a high-risk attempt to contact, befriend and evangelize the violent Waodani people (also called Waorani or Auca). The five carried guns but didn't defend themselves when attacked.
Here.
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Subject: England awakens to niggers
Murder in black and white
Camilla Cavendish
THE MURDER of Tom ap Rhys Pryce has really got under the skin of London's professional class. When a 31-year-old Cambridge-educated lawyer is viciously stabbed to death in a Tube station for no apparent reason, it plays to our deepest fears of what happens when parallel worlds collide.
"I live on the Bakerloo Line too," I've heard many say this week. "He was me — all of us." The optimistic young man on his way up, living with his fiancée on the fringe in Kensal Green — not wealthy Kensington — carrying his downloaded wedding plans. The archetypal City worker whose death was apparently treated so lightly that a black man in a white pork-pie hat nonchalantly produced his Oyster card the following morning, then just ambled away when the ticket machine rejected it. A shocking, grubby finale to an unspeakable event.
We cannot shake it. The grainy CCTV shots of Mr ap Rhys Pryce's last unsuspecting moments ride on top of an accumulation of other recent images in our minds. The banker John Monckton and his wife, struggling in vain to close their front door against a junkie on bail and a murderous thug on early release. The security chain swinging loose, his shouts of "No, no no!" and all the futile gestures that intelligence makes when confronted with dumb brutality. Richard Whelan, 28, stabbed six times on the upper deck of the No 43 bus for standing up and politely asking a black youth to stop throwing chips at his girlfriend. The street lights passing on the Holloway Road, the fatal lunge, the dizzy shock of collapse.
These images run like a constant commentary in my head. I, born and bred in London and used to blithely wandering the streets, now see would-be attackers out of the corner of my eye. I grasp the keys in my pocket in a pathetic, premature gesture of defence and defiance. Statistically, I know that these horrific events are still highly unusual. But they are amplified because they feel so close. They loom large in monochrome: black on white killings, fitfully sketched on CCTV. An Irish-born businessman told me this weekend that he felt London was turning into Johannesburg. An overstatement, surely, but heartfelt.
We abhor randomness. We search for motive where there is none. We seek to engage rationality, but find only hate. In a city driven by ambition, this violence does not fit the lexicon. It is senseless, gratuitous, the desire to strike even when all the cash is handed over. The realisation that this brutality is not negotiable — that there was nothing the victims could have said or offered to stay alive — brings on a queasy vertigo. I feel a heightened consciousness of the fragility of intelligent life, a sudden tenderness towards bicycling professors, nerdy executives, even the witnesses behind the windows in Mr ap Rhys Pryce's street.
What are we supposed to conclude? That we must stand stock still in the face of violence, as the Asian man did who was robbed by the same gang 30 minutes before Mr ap Rhys Pryce was killed? It is possible, although we do not know, that the lawyer did try to fight back in some way. Some of my neighbours recently hired a private security firm after a spate of muggings. But is that really the answer in the long term, to seal off the community? Should we all run from the station to one's front door, gripping our keys and holding out our wallets to strangers?
My powerful mental pictures are somehow erasing the daily courtesies: the hand-up with the pram, the black teenager in the hoody who gives me his seat on the Tube and winks a smiling "so there". The fact is that "stranger murder" is still relatively rare in London, and those at most risk are poor and black. The number of murders has fallen. Since April last year there have been 130, excluding the July bombings. That compares with 144 over the same period the year before.
The great wheel of capitalism turns, raising some up to heights they never dreamt possible. That is the great achievement of this city. But those on the wheel rarely see those who languish off it. It is only when they venture out of Clapton's murder mile or Loughborough Junction that they come into focus. Meanwhile, the middle-class advertising and music set, who slope to work in beanies and trainers to "fit in", as scared as anyone of attracting hostile attention, are busy blasting minds with a different, even more powerful set of images.
Forget the TV watershed: go to the gym any morning and see how MTV gyrates to a synthesis of glamour and brutality first perfected by Stanley Kubrick. Watch the software industry deny yet again the obvious conclusion found by a recent American study, that violent computer games make people more aggressive. Read the fawning reviews of gangsta rap by middle-class white boys who have no idea what it is like to live in the world it describes.
Tomorrow the film Get Rich or Die Tryin' opens in Britain. Its hero is the rapper Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, whose album of the same name contains the usual litany of guns, gangs, bitches and blood. The BBC's Urban Review says of the album that Get Rich or Die Tryin' is "the antithesis to the pop-looped chart-friendly sound of mainstream hip hop". How cool, how clever, how naive.
Reviewers always mention, with a sort of reflected pride, that "50 Cent" has been shot nine times. Their fascination was not dented one iota by the adverts showing him carrying a baby in one hand and a gun in the other. The Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the advert "gave the impression that success could be achieved through violence". Universal Music Group defended the imagery, stating it was meant to "portray 50 Cent's struggle to escape the hardened streets of Queens, New York".
Come off it. We must keep the danger in perspective, but we must also stop glorifying a world that is colliding with ours.
Here.
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