Bill’s Blog

“Not for the politically correct.”

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DrudgeReport.com

• Democratic Senators Praise Bush, Military

• American Dollar Falls to New Low Against the Euro

• American Entertainers Among Intellectuals in Campaign to Support Castro

• New York Times Reporter Forced to Resign for Breaking Journalistic Ethics

• Olive Baboons in Kenya Dying of Horrific Venereal Disease

• Communist Chinese Navy Loses 70 in Submarine Accident

• Black Market Economy Driven by Marijuana, Porn, and Illegal Aliens

• Colorado Hiker Whose Arm Was Pinned by Boulder Amputates It to Survive

• New Evidence That Mobile Phones Endanger Commercial Flights

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Daschle Says Bush Deserves 'Great Credit' For Wartime Leadership...

It’s nice to see these Democratic senators behaving sensibly.

"I think we can be immensely proud of the quality of military," said Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D. "Our men and women in uniform performed with extraordinary distinction and courage."

Johnson's son Brooks, a sergeant with the Army's elite 101st Airborne Division, is serving somewhere near Baghdad. As heavy fighting subsided, Brooks Johnson has been able to be in somewhat regular e-mail contact with his family in the United States, and the senator said packages from home have gotten through to Iraq.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said Bush deserved "great credit" for his leadership during the war and praised the work of the military. Days before the war began, Daschle had blamed Bush's failed diplomacy for making the fighting necessary and was criticized for his remarks.

Dollar falls even lower versus Euro...

One hopes this will reverse as the economy turns around.

The euro surged to $1.1230 on Thursday, up from $1.1100 on Wednesday, pushing it to within about 5 cents of the level at which the single currency was introduced in January 1999 but had never regained in the four years of its existence. The dollar has plunged 2.5 percent against the euro this week alone.

Intellectuals Launch Campaign to Defend Cuba...

U.S. singer Harry Belafonte and U.S. actor Danny Glover are also among the personalities who have signed the two-paragraph declaration "To the Conscience of the World" so far, …

REPORTER FOR NEW YORK TIMES RESIGNS AMID QUESTIONS OVER STORY...

Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who copied portions of a Texas newspaper's story about a woman whose son died during the war in Iraq, resigned under pressure yesterday.

"The Times apologizes to its readers for a grave breach of its journalistic standards," Executive Editor Howell Raines said in a statement. "We will also apologize to the family of the soldier . . . for heightening their pain in a time of mourning."

Horrific venereal disease strikes African baboons...

The disease was found in olive baboons (Papiocynocephalus anubis). I don’t believe that poachers kill baboons for bush meat, so the baboons don’t look like a vector to humans as chimpanzees were with AI/DS.

A horrific venereal disease is preying on baboons in eastern Africa. An estimated 200 animals have been infected and scientists are scrambling to identify the mystery microbe that is attacking them.

The disease targets the reproductive organs of the primate. The consequences for male baboons are particularly gruesome, says Elibariki Mtui, of the African Wildlife Foundation in Arusha, Tanzania. "The genitals kind of rot away, then they just drop off," he told New Scientist.

Chinese Submarine Accident Kills 70...

China, like many countries, maintains a force of non-nuclear submarines.

Mechanical failure aboard a conventionally powered Chinese submarine killed 70 crew members, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday.

POT AND PORN OUTSTRIPPING CORN: Marijuana, pornography and illegal labor have created hidden market in United States which now accounts for 10% of the American economy, according to a study...

Amazon link to book

Despite laws that punish marijuana cultivation more strictly than murder in some states, Americans spend more on illegal drugs than on cigarettes. And despite official disapproval of pornography, the US leads the world in export of explicit sex videos, according to Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labour in the American Black Market, by Eric Schlosser.

Although the official American economy has been suffering a downturn, the shadow economy is enjoying unprecedented levels of success, much in the way that the prohibition period fuelled the illegal markets in the 30s. Schlosser found that three specific industries accounted for a major portion of this boom.

…

The total number of illegal immigrants is estimated at about 8 million and many are being paid cash in a shadow economy.

…

… "Maintaining the current level of poverty among migrant farmworkers saves the average American household around $50 a year."

The advantages to the employer are clear, most notably in LA county, where an estimated 28% of workers are paid in cash.

…

"A society that can punish a marijuana offender more severely than a murderer is caught in the grip of a deep psychosis," he concludes. …

Colorado climber amputates pinned arm, hikes to safety...

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. (AP) — The climber who amputated his own arm to free himself from beneath a boulder had no other choice if he wanted to survive, one of his rescuers said Friday.

Aron Ralston, 27, of Aspen would have died had he stayed where he was, in remote Blue John Canyon near Canyonlands National Park in the far southwestern Utah, Emery County sheriff's Sgt. Mitch Vetere told NBC's Today show.

New evidence passengers using mobile phones endanger aircraft...

There is new evidence passengers using mobile phones endanger aircraft, according to a Civil Aviation Authority report obtained by BBC News Online.

In tests, compasses froze or overshot, navigation bearings were inaccurate and there was interference on radio channels.

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 OpinionJournal.com

• Peer to Peer Networks Expose Children to Porn

• Princeton Offers Insignia Thongs

• Survivors of War Usually Don’t Need Trauma Therapy

• Straight Talk on the Israeli–Palestinian Arab Problem

• Most Americans Agree That Public Schools Are Awful

• Best of the Web Today

  • Castro Fears He Will Go the Way of Saddam

  • Suicide Bombers Were “Peace Activists”

  • John Kerry’s European Mores

  • Great Moments in Civil Rights

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It's pornography. According to a recent study of one such file-trading system, porn is the most sought-after content. And this affects children in two ways. Most brutally, a fair chunk of what's being swapped is not just porn but child porn--as the folks at Purdue learned when several students were found to have used the university network to download it. Perhaps even more insidious is a parallel finding by investigators at the General Accounting Office that children using P2P software for completely innocent searches are as likely as not to unearth porn.

PRINCETON BRIEFS: It's not quite the Princeton Tiger that former Secretary of State George Shultz is said to have tattooed on his derriere. But the University Store now offers a more racy Princeton alternative to the sweatshirts, T-shirts and gym shorts bearing the university imprimatur: Princeton-themed thongs, in four colors, including the official orange and black. That, according to the Daily Princetonian, may make the university "the only Ivy League school to carry an insignia thong." As the paper puts it, the thongs make "showing Tiger spirit a little more cheeky."

… Symptom checklists give a limited picture. A study of Rwandan adults who saw relatives and friends hacked to death found that up to 90% said they had trouble sleeping, poor concentration and bad memories--symptoms of PTSD. Yet more than half were optimistic about the future and their ability to care for their families. …

The second lesson is that survivors often reject therapy--for good reasons. "Many resent the implication by mental-health providers that they are emotionally abnormal in any way," Mr. Weinstein says. What's more, talking about painful experiences with a stranger is alien to them culturally and off-putting as well. Consider the experience of Kenneth Miller of the Bosnian Mental Health Program in Chicago. The psychologist's patients were in concentration camps before emigrating to the U.S., yet most of them welcomed efforts to relieve their day-to-day loneliness and worry over economic survival as much as, if not more than, efforts to deal with war-related trauma.

This is a lengthy but informative column.

Dennis Ross, the former U.S. negotiator for the Middle East, recently admitted that ever since the last Gulf War, he and other U.S. negotiators failed to take seriously the Palestinian Authority's steadfast refusal to end violence. (As Mr. Ross put it in State Department doublespeak: "The prudential issues of compliance were neglected and politicized by the Americans in favor of keeping the peace process afloat.") Instead, in the face of the continuing violence, the U.S. kept pressing Israel to make further concessions, thereby convincing Palestinians that they could go on cheating and killing and still procure the benefits for which they had been negotiating. …

• Some longstanding American policies, however, have contributed to terrorism, and especially to terrorism against Israel. …

• Consider, first, the longstanding strategy of Arab states and the Palestine Liberation Organization to keep as many Palestinians as possible living under horrible conditions in refugee camps, close to Israel.…

• Second, the Palestinian educational system is an abomination; it, too, is largely funded by the U.N., with the substantial support of American taxpayers. …

• The U.N. and the U.S. have allowed these terrible practices to continue for years. …

• Third, our policies have worked to prevent Israel from defending itself against terrorism. …

Public Agenda, a New York-based nonprofit that does opinion surveys on a range of issues, compiled an analysis of a decade of polling on public education, and news reports about the study were eye-catching. Mainly the message was that while accountability matters in the public mind, what really upsets people is the generalized disorderliness in public schools. …

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FrontPageMag.com

• Horowitz Continues Critique of Neo-Communists

• Leftists Who Favor UN Try to Stop Appointment of Jay Garner

• Leftist War Tax Resistance Hypocrisy

• Disloyal Hollywood Types Worry About Their Careers While America Buries Its Dead

• Mark Steyn: The UN Is Unfit to Govern

• Details on Russia–Saddam Cooperation

• The True Nature of Islam

• Libya Accepts Responsibility for Lockerbie Bombing

• Navy Abandons Vieques Bombing Range

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This is an outstanding article. Horowitz uses the term “neo-communist” to describe what used to be known as the New Left.

Link to “Taking on the Neo-Coms, Part I”

The resistance to the term “neo-communist,” derives from a misunderstanding of the nature of a political left that is proud of its Communist heritage – gulags aside -- (as this left mainly is) and still clings to socialist “solutions” and the revolutionary idea (as this left mainly does). There are always (and inevitably) two sides to the revolutionary coin. The first is negative and destructive, since it is necessary first to undermine the beliefs, values and institutions of the old order which must be destroyed before a new one can be established. The second is positive and utopian, a vision of the future that condemns the present and encapsulates the idea of a redemptive fate.

…

For even in its innocent beginnings, the new left defined itself by negatives, as “anti-anti Communist.” It was a “new” left because it did not want to identify with communism. But it also did not want to oppose Communism either, because then it would have had to support America’s Cold War. “Anti-anti Communism” was the code for its anti-Americanism. What the left wanted was to oppose America and its “sham democracy.”

In Greek mythology Medea is the daughter of the King of Colchis who bretrays her country to help Jason gain the golden fleece. She returned to Greece with Jason and married him, but murdered Jason’s children when he abandoned her for another woman.

Mentions the War Resisters League and the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, which it sponsors.

Once again, the media has succeeded in portraying a group of America-hating left-wing extremists as highly moral people of conscience.

On and around April 15, a number of news outlets including The Denver Post and the Associated Press ran articles about the War Tax Resistance Movement, a group of peace activists who refuse to pay all or part of their income taxes because some tax money might go to support the military. Not surprisingly, the media portrayed the "tax resisters" as average folks who hate war while ignoring their loony far-left agenda and hatred of America.

Now, it appears, some celebrities worry about damage to their careers. …

Steyn points out that the civil war in Congo is a far worse humanitarian disaster than the operation to depose Iraq. Steyn also points out that Congo is the result of Belgian imperialism while many of the former British colonies got “nation building” which allowed them to become democracies.

… Last month, the Russians were opposed to war on the grounds that there was no proof Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. This month, the Russians are opposed to lifting sanctions on the grounds that there's no proof Iraq doesn't have weapons of mass destruction.

You don't have to be a genius to see that, since September 11th, we have entered a transitional phase in world affairs. But reasonable people are prone to reasonableness and, as I mentioned the other day, they're especially vulnerable to the seductive power of inertia in human affairs. The wish not to have to update one's Rolodex burns fiercely in the political breast. Brent Scowcroft, George Bush Sr.'s National Security Advisor, wanted to stick with the Soviet Union even after the Politburo had given up on it. The European Union was committed to the preservation of Yugoslavia even when there had ceased to be a Yugoslavia to preserve. In the Middle East, clinging to the status quo even as it's melting and dripping on to your shoes is one reason why the region is now a problem.

…

… The Middle East is in its present condition in part because the European powers kept propping up the Turkish Empire decades after it had ceased to be prop-up-able. It would have been much better for all concerned if Britain had got its hands on Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia in the 1870s rather than four decades later. …

Yet, recent discoveries show that goodwill is shallower than previously believed. In the aftermath of the U.S.-led Iraqi disarmament campaign, both British and American journalists unearthed documents implying a long-standing relationship between Iraq and Russia.

An excellent article on the nature of Islam.

Islamic fundamentalism, which has become politically active in the last hundred years, is not a new religion or a new variation of Islam. It is an expression of classic theocratic Islam in reaction to the secularization of certain Muslim counties, such as Turkey, Kuwait or Iraq. Classic Islam feels threatened by modernization and potential secularization. …

Unlike Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and most other religions, Islam is a politically driven religion bound on military triumph, conquest and subjugation. …

… Built into Islam are the doctrines of the infallibility of Mohammed and the Qur’an, the superiority and supremacy of Muslims over all non-believers (infidels) -- implying religious intolerance, the concept of the Umma – the Islamic universal nation, and the goal of having all of humanity become Muslim or at least subjugated to Islam.

…

The Islamic premise that land conquered by Arabs belongs to the Umma for perpetuity and cannot ever be given back to infidels is the ideological basis for the one-hundred-year-long bloody war with the Jews in the land of Israel.

The Libyan government has accepted responsibility for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, potentially clearing a major obstacle to eliminating U.S. and U.N. economic sanctions on the country, Libyan Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalqam said today.

His statement represents the latest concession by Libya, which previously agreed to establish a fund to compensate families of the explosion's 270 victims. During discussions with lawyers representing the families, Libyan officials said they would pay up to $10 million for each victim in three installments as sanctions are lifted, according to U.S. sources familiar with the negotiations.

It’s about time!

The navy handed over 15,000 acres of land on the eastern end of Vieques to the U.S. Department of the Interior, the military said in a statement. After an extensive cleanup, the property will become a wildlife refuge.

Downside: the Left will probably start claiming this as a capitulation to them.

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Jewish World Review.com

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 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
 (Subscription Site)

• In the news

• Mena Nursing Home Gets Record Judgement Against It for Horrible Mistreatment of Patient

• Leon Holmes’ Nomination to Federal Judiciary Sent to Full Senate

• Juarez Women May Have Been Murdered for Their Organs

• Experiment Turns Mouse Stem Cells Into Ovae

• French Ambassador Uninvited from Participating in a Valley Forge Ceremony

• Pulaski Gets ‘F’ for Ozone Second Year in a Row

• Democrats Displeased with Seven House Members Who Sided with Republicans

• LR Planning Commission Approves Renaming Part of Asher Avenue

• 350 Harrison Residents Use National Day of Prayer to Aplolgize for Race Riots

• LR Racial and Cultural Diversity Commission Will Have “Healing Racism Institute” Class

• More Indictments for Enron Execs

• Meredith Oakley: Grand Jury Report Proves Pulaski County Voting Procedures Not Lawful

• Letters

  • Excessive taxes hurt the working man

  • Gene Lyons’ Criticism of Bush Inappropriate

  • Daschle’s Criticism of Bush an Embarassment to All

  • Tax and Spend Legislators a “Reason for Term Limits”

• Brian Calzacorto, of Clearwater, Florida was convicted of rape and murder in spite of his insistence that the crimes were committed by his identical twin who lives elsewhere.
• Michael Machetti is suing a Banning, Calif. tatoo parlor for giving him a skin infection while covering tatoos he got earlier which had the number 666 and obscene words.
• Stephen Thompson, a Superior Court judge in Trenton, N.J., was arrested for child pornography.

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ArkDemocrat

The state Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a jury verdict against a Mena nursing home but cut the damages award from $78 million to $26 million.

The unanimous decision sets up a potential confrontation between the court and Arkansas’ new tort reform law.

The female patient was left lying in her own body wastes and allowed to get pressure sores.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines Thursday to forward the nomination of Leon Holmes to the full Senate, but did so without making a recommendation for or against his nomination.

The last time the committee sent a district court nomination to the floor with anything but a favorable recommendation was 1951.

MEXICO CITY — Authorities suspect some of the dozens of women slain during a decade of unsolved murders in the border city of Ciudad Juarez were hunted down and killed by a gang that harvested and sold their internal organs.

In a surprise late-night announcement Wednesday, the attorney general’s office said 14 of the 88 women whose decomposed remains have been found in the city of 1.3 million across the border from El Paso, Texas, in the last decade may have been kidnapped and killed for their organs.

Science fiction writer Larry Niven coined the term “organlegging” to describe this crime back in the 1960s.

The big question is whether these organs are finding their way into America.

Mouse embryonic stem cells turned spontaneously into eggs in an experiment that some scientists think points toward a new source of eggs for therapeutic cloning and perhaps remove a major obstacle from using stem cells to treat disease.

Without using any special chemicals or growth stimulants, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania said stem cells from mouse embryos will transform into oocytes, or eggs, and then into primitive embryos.

When word got out that the French ambassador was going to speak at Valley Forge this weekend to celebrate French Alliance Day, the phone at Washington Memorial Chapel started ringing off the hook.

Many callers said they didn’t like the French opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq and didn’t care about the nations’ trans-Atlantic friendship that dates from the Revolutionary War.

So rector R. James Larsen reluctantly told French officials that the church in Valley Forge National Historical Park would have to withdraw the invitation. The schedule called for the event to coincide with the 225th anniversary of George Washington’s encampment at Valley Forge.

Since it turned out that France was secretly helping Saddam, the opponents were correct in wanting to keep the French out. While Bourbon France was instrumental in helping us win the American Revolution, we more than repaid France by kicking the Germans out of it twice. If gratitude is a God-honoring attitude then it’s easy to tell which side France is on.

Another view is that if France rejected the ancien regime in the French Revolution then it rejected its role in the American Revolution. If so, then we don’t owe them anything. The downside of the French Revolution was that it birthed the odious ideology of socialism.

For the second year in a row, Pulaski and Crittenden counties received F’s from the group because of the number of days both experienced high levels of ozone.

The report identifies only 26 counties in the nation that improved their scores, including two in Arkansas — Montgomery, which earned an A and Newton, which received a B. Their grades were B and C last year.

This could lead to federally mandated emissions testing of automobiles.

Some Democrats aren’t pleased with several party members who helped the Republican minority in the Arkansas House of Representatives force the adjournment of the regular session without a state budget last month.

State Democratic Party Chairman Ron Oliver said most of about 100 Democrats attending last Saturday’s meeting of the state Democratic Committee in Russellville cheered when state Rep. Linda Pondexter Chesterfield, D-Little Rock, criticized seven House Democrats for joining 27 House Republicans to end the regular session.

Many of the new Republicans were freshmen who had made no new taxes pledges.

Hoping to shed the reputation they say is connected with Asher Avenue, a group of residents and businessmen moved closer to shedding the Little Rock artery’s name Thursday.

The Little Rock Planning Commission on Thursday approved a proposal that renames a two-mile section of Asher Avenue to Colonel Glenn Road. The measure to rename the stretch of road west of University Avenue likely will go before the city’s Board of Directors next month.

New approach to municipal governance: instead of cleaning up the street just change the name.

This article has information on former Pulaski County Judge Joseph Asher, who died in 1931.

About 350 residents knelt on the ground in the Harrison town square Thursday night and asked for forgiveness for race riots that took place nearly 100 years ago.

Church leaders addressed the city’s reputation for prejudice with speeches and a pledge to promote the city as "a warm, welcoming community, inclusive of all races."

The activities, organized as part of National Day of Prayer, marked the city’s first public acknowledgment of deeds dating back almost 100 years, organizers said.

Harrison has been characterized as an intolerant community in recent years because a national Ku Klux Klan leader lives nearby, New Hearts Church pastor Wayne Kelly said Thursday night. The image was brought up again last fall after a dispute during a junior high football game involving black Fayetteville players and white Harrison players.

This could be a politically correct debasement to the racial Left, which is heightened by similar coverage by the Little Rock television local news shows.

It could also be a politically correct denial of the reality of disproportionate black crime.

The mention of the KKK is a slander. The overwhelming majority of the residents Harrison don’t like having the KKK in nearby Lead and have no power to make them move.

Racial bias class set this summer

The Little Rock Racial and Cultural Diversity Commission is organizing a class as part of the Healing Racism Institute series this summer.

The series gives people the opportunity to discuss racial bias and related topics such as stereotypes, internalizing oppression, unrecognized racial bias and the cycle of racial conditioning, said Carlette Henderson, the commission’s executive director.

The free classes will be offered May 12-June 23 and Sept. 22 -Oct. 27 at the Neighborhood Resource Center from 6 to 9 p.m.

More information about registration is available at (501) 244-5464.

The big question is whether the Little Rock Racial and Cultural Diversity Commission is promoting the politically correct racial ideology that makes race relations worse.

The terms “unrecognized racial bias” and “the cycle of racial conditioning” certainly have a Left-wing tone.

“Diversity” is a Left-wing term.

If “healing” means promoting socialism then the cure is worse than the ailment.

Dozens more charges were filed Thursday against Enron Corp.’s former chief financial officer, Andrew Fastow, as his wife and nine other former executives were indicted on multiple counts of fraud, insider trading and other charges.

The more the merrier!

Three months, $23,000 and 21 witnesses after a special grand jury was convened to investigate problems in the election process of Pulaski County, we know for sure what we could only surmise before the process began.

One, voter registration in the state’s most populous county is a mess.

Two, the voter registration mandates of the Arkansas Constitution are not being followed.

Three, nothing will be done to force those responsible for the mess to clean it up and start complying with the law.

Ms. Oakley has correctly criticize the lack of indictments in this investigation.

 Other Links

• Official Cuban Newspaper Publishes Pictures of “Anti-war” Demonstrations

• Cuban Propaganda Says US Wants a “world Nazi–fascist dictatorship”

• Republic of Cuba Web Site

• Russia Closed Radar Stations in Cuba and Communist Vietnam in 2001

• Jew Killer in Crown Heights Pogrom Admits He Murdered Yankel Rosenbaum

• NY Court Learns NJ Mob Boss Whacked for Being Gay

Granma is the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party. Unfortunately, the pictures aren’t captioned, so you can’t tell which ones were taken in the U. S.

In the midst of the imperial euphoria over the unlimited warfare through which the United States proposes to impose a world Nazi-fascist dictatorship, the anti-Cuban Miami mafia is claiming direct reprisals against Cuba and demonstrating at the same time, that it is precisely the force that controls U.S. policy toward the island.

This Communist propaganda appears to allude to Godfather II, which insinuated that Fidel was the hero for keeping Cuba out of the grasp of the Corleone and Roth crime families.

Numerous international press agencies reported today that the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, declared that as of January 2002, his country would close its military Electronic Radar Stations in Cam Ranh, Vietnam and Lourdes, Cuba.

…

Cam Ranh was a naval base built by the United States some 20 thousand kilometers away from its territory and leased to the USSR in 1979, years after the war had ended. It is of barely any use for a country like Russia, which has had practically no surface vessel fleet since the demise of the Soviet Union.

The site has a link “Cam Ranh” could mean Cam Rahn Bay. One wonders why Russia didn’t close these stations shortly after the Cold War ended.

Unfortunately, this article doesn’t mention Al Sharpton’s role.

Lemrick Nelson is facing his third trial in connection with the stabbing to death of Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old rabbinical student, in 1991 during the Crown Heights riots in New York, one of the most vicious episodes of inter-racial violence between blacks and Jews.

…

In 1997 he was convicted in a federal court of violating Rosenbaum's civil rights, on the grounds that the attack was anti-semitic. The verdict was overturned on appeal because the trial judge had improperly attempted to balance the number of Jews and blacks on the jury.

In both trials Mr Nelson denied killing Rosenbaum, saying evidence had been planted on him, and others had been responsible. The civil retrial began on Monday with a dramatic turnaround.

Mr Nelson admitted stabbing Rosenbaum, but said he had done so because he was drunk, not because his victim was Jewish. Since Mr. Nelson has been acquitted of murder, and cannot again be tried for that crime, the issue is no longer that he attacked Rosenbaum, but why he did.

The case hinges on the atmosphere of mob violence and recrimination that dominated the night of August 19 1991 in Crown Heights, an area largely segregated between African-Americans and Caribbeans on one hand, and Jews on the other. A Hasidic man in a car ran over a African-American boy, Gavin Cato, seven, and was attacked by a black mob.

A Hasidic ambulance arrived and took care of the driver and left (under orders from the police, it later transpired) while the boy and his injured cousin had to wait for a city ambulance. He died, and hours later Rosenbaum was attacked as black youths started to riot. One man, Charles Price, was later convicted of instigating the attacks by calling on the crowd to "Get the Jew" and "An eye for an eye!"

The boss of the mafia family on which the Sopranos series is believed to be based was executed by one of his own soldiers because he was gay and they feared that if news got out the family would be ridiculed by the rest of the underworld, a Manhattan court has been told.

"Nobody's gonna respect us if we have a gay homosexual boss sitting down discussing La Cosa Nostra business," an informer told the court on Wednesday.

John "Johnny Boy" D'Amato, head of the DeCavalcante family, the biggest in the state of New Jersey, was shot dead in 1992 after it was rumoured that he was having relationships with other men.

The hit took place in 1992.

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