Crime : opération vérité à Londres

Hier nous avons évoqué cet accès inattendu d'honnêteté du New York Times qui accepte de publier une tribune libre démontrant que la majorité des crimes commis dans la grande métropole américaine le sont par des criminels Noirs ou Hispaniques.

Le fait que les personnes de couleur soient davantage interpelées puis condamnées ne constitue donc pas une preuve du racisme de la police et de la judicature mais bien la conséquence d'un comportement plus crimonogène de ces populations.

Aujourd'hui, Andrew Alderson dans le Daily Telegraph publie les statistiques officielles révélant ce que les bien-pensants de gauche veulent céler, que les Noirs commettent la majorité des crimes violents à Londres. Dans le même temps, toutefois, des Noirs constituent également une fraction importante des victimes.

Aucun des papiers ne s'interroge sur les causes de cette plus grande criminalité des personnes de couleur. Pour le moment, le lien entre un QI (quotient intellectuel) inférieur à celui, par exemple, des Chinois, ou d'un niveau moyen de testostérone supérieur à celui, par exemple, des Japonais, n'est abordé que par des universitaires dont les travaux sont victimes d'un ostracisme absolu.

Les révélations anglaises ont été accueillies d'une manière positive par un homme politique noir conservateur et travailleur social, Shaun Bailey, qui en appelle à la communauté noire à un travail d'introspection pour tenter de trouver des solutions à ce drame social.

Sans suprise, la gauche bien-pensante représentée par Richard Garside a renvoyé toute la responsabilité sur le « racisme et l'impérialisme anglais ».

Qu'en est-il de la France ?

Violent inner-city crime, the figures, and a question of race


The reality of violent inner-city crime is indicated today by statistics obtained by The Sunday Telegraph. The official figures, which examine the ethnicity of those accused of violent offences in London, suggest the majority of men held responsible by police for gun crimes, robberies and street crimes are black. Black men are also disproportionately the victims of violent crime in the capital.



One prominent black politician said that the black community needed to face up to major challenges.
Shaun Bailey, a Tory election candidate in London and a charity worker, said: “The black community has to look at itself and say that, at the end of the day, these figures suggest we are heavily – not casually – involved in violent crime. We are also involved in crime against ourselves – and we regularly attack each other.”
The data provide a breakdown of the ethnicity of the 18,091 men and boys who police took action against for a range of violent and sexual offences in London in 2009-10.
They show that among those proceeded against for street crimes, 54 per cent were black; for robbery, 59 per cent; and for gun crimes, 67 per cent. Street crimes include muggings, assault with intent to rob and snatching property.
Just over 12 per cent of London’s 7.5 million population is black, including those of mixed black and white parentage, while 69 per cent is white, according to the Office for National Statistics.
The police figures also show that black men are twice as likely to be victims. They made up 29 per cent of the male victims of gun crime and 24 per cent of the male victims of knife crime.
The Met declined to comment on the statistics. However, some officers will see them as a justification for Operation Trident, a unit targeting black-on-black murder and violent crime.
Others will see it as justification for targeting a disproportionate number of black men under stop and search powers. Figures released annually have shown black people are at least six times more likely to be stopped and searched than their white counterparts.
On sex offences, black men made up 32 per cent of male suspects proceeded against, and white men 49 per cent. The statistics also suggest that black women are responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime committed by females.
Richard Garside, of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London, said: “Given Britain’s long history of racism and imperialism it should not greatly surprise us that black and minority ethnic groups are disproportionately members of social classes that have tended to experience greater victimisation and to be the subject of police attention.
“Just because the police treat black men as more criminal than white men, it does not mean that they are.” Simon Woolley, speaking as the director of the Operation Black Vote pressure group, but who is also a commissioner on the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said: “Although the charge rates for some criminal acts amongst black men are high, black people are more than twice as likely to have their cases dismissed, suggesting unfairness in the system.”
The Sunday Telegraph obtained the figures via a Freedom of Information request after Rod Liddle, the writer, caused controversy last year when he claimed in an online blog published on The Spectator website that “the overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”.
The comments led to claims that Mr Liddle was racist, However, Mr Liddle said: “I cannot think of anything more vile than racism. The issue here is not racism, it is one of multiculturalism.”
The statistics suggest that Mr Liddle was largely right on some of his claims – notably those on gun crimes, robberies and street crimes.
The figures suggest, however, that he was probably wrong on his claims about knife crimes and violent sex crimes.
The figures relate to those “proceeded against”.
This includes those prosecuted in court, whether convicted or acquitted; those issued with a caution, warning or penalty notice; those the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to charge; and those whose crimes were “taken into consideration” after a further offence.
Unsolved crimes are not included.
The figures do not take into account that any one perpetrator may have committed numerous offences .

La guerre, douleur et mort

L'hélico arrive tout près du blessé.

La guerre possède un visage que les romantiques n'aiment guère, celui de la douleur, de la mort. Le New York Times nous offre un superbe reportage dont voici quelques images avec un excellent article de C. J. CHIVERS


As Afghan Fighting Expands, U.S. Medics Plunge In


FRANTIC MOMENTS During a recent battle near Marja, an infantry patrol carried a wounded Marine to a medevac helicopter.


MARJA, Afghanistan — The Marine had been shot in the skull. He was up ahead, at the edge of a field, where the rest of his patrol was fighting. A Black Hawk medevac helicopter flew above treetops toward him, banked and hovered dangerously before landing nearby.

United Nations Could Hasten Removal of Taliban Leaders From Terror Blacklist (June 13, 2010)
U.S. Military Intelligence Puts Focus on Afghan Graft (June 13, 2010)
Several Marines carried the man aboard. His head was bandaged, his body limp. Sgt. Ian J. Bugh, the flight medic, began the rhythms of CPR as the helicopter lifted over gunfire and zigzagged away. Could this man be saved?

Nearly nine years into the Afghan war, with the number of troops here climbing toward 100,000, the pace for air crews that retrieve the wounded has become pitched.

In each month this year, more American troops in Afghanistan have been killed than in any of the same months of any previous year. Many of those fighting on the ground, facing ambushes and powerful hidden bombs, say that as the Obama administration’s military buildup pushes more troops into Taliban strongholds, the losses could soon rival those during the worst periods in Iraq.

Under NATO guidance, all seriously wounded troops are expected to arrive at a trauma center within 60 minutes of their unit’s calling for help. In Helmand Province, Afghanistan’s most dangerous ground, most of them do.

These results can make the job seem far simpler than it is. Last week, a Black Hawk on a medevac mission in the province was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade, and four members of its crew were killed. And the experiences in May and early June of one Army air crew, from Company C, Sixth Battalion, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, showed the challenges of distance, sandstorms and Taliban fighters waiting near landing zones.

It also showed crews confronting sorrows as old as combat. In a guerrilla war that is turning more violent, young men in nameless places suffer wounds that, no matter a crew’s speed or skill, can quickly sap away life.

For Company C’s detachment in Helmand Province, the recent duty had been harried.

Over several days the crews had retrieved a Marine who had lost both legs and an arm to a bomb explosion; the medic had kept that man alive. They had picked up two Marines bitten by their unit’s bomb-sniffing dog. They landed for a corporal whose back had been injured in a vehicle accident.

And day after day they had scrambled to evacuate Afghans or Marines struck by bullets or blasted by bombs, including a mission that nearly took them to a landing zone where the Taliban had planted a second bomb, with hopes that an aircraft might land on it. The Marines had found the trap and directed the pilots to a safer spot.

Les infirmiers se ruent vers le blessé.

A few days before the Marine was shot in the skull, after sandstorms had grounded aircraft, another call had come in. A bomb had exploded beside a patrol along the Helmand River. Two Marines were wounded. One was dying.

For hours the airspace had been closed; supervisors deemed the conditions too dangerous to fly. The crews wanted to evacuate the Marines. “I’ll go,” said Sgt. Jason T. Norris, a crew chief. “I’ll walk.”

A crew was given permission to try. Ordinarily, medevac flights take off with an older, experienced pilot in command and a younger aviator as co-pilot. The two take turns on the controls.

From Kandahar, the brigade commander, Col. William K. Gayler, ordered a change. This flight demanded experience. Chief Warrant Officer Joseph N. Callaway, who had nearly 3,000 flight hours, would replace a younger pilot and fly with Chief Warrant Officer Deric G. Sempsrott, who had nearly 2,000 hours.

Afghan sandstorms take many forms. Some drift by in vertical sheets of dust. Others spiral into spinning towers of grit. Many lash along the ground, obscuring vision. Powdered sand accumulates like snow.

Le blessé a perdu beaucoup de sang mais est toujours conscient.

This storm had another form: an airborne layer of dirt from 100 to 4,000 feet above the ground. It left a low-elevation slot through which the pilots might try to fly.

The Black Hawk lifted off in dimming evening light. It flew at 130 knots 30 to 40 feet above the ground, so low it created a bizarre sensation, as if the helicopter were not an aircraft, but a deafening high-speed train.

Ten minutes out, the radio updated the crew. One of the Marines had died. The crew chief, Sgt. Grayson Colby, sagged. He reached for a body bag. Then he slipped on rubber gloves and sat upright. There was still a man to save.

Just before a hill beside the river, Mr. Callaway banked the Black Hawk right, then abruptly turned left and circled. The helicopter leaned hard over. He looked down. A smoke grenade’s red plume rose, marking the patrol.

The Black Hawk landed beside dunes. Sergeant Bugh and Sergeant Colby leapt out.

A corporal, Brett Sayre, had been hit in the face by the bomb’s blast wave and debris. He staggered forward, guided by other Marines.

Sergeant Bugh examined him inside the Black Hawk. Corporal Sayre’s eyes were packed with dirt. He was large and lean, a fit young man sitting upright, trying not to choke on blood clotting and flowing from his mouth.

United Nations Could Hasten Removal of Taliban Leaders From Terror Blacklist (June 13, 2010)
U.S. Military Intelligence Puts Focus on Afghan Graft (June 13, 2010)
The sergeant asked him to lie down. The corporal waved his arm.

“You’re a Marine,” the sergeant said. “Be strong. We’ll get you out of here.”

Corporal Sayre rested stiffly on his right side.

Sergeant Colby climbed aboard. He had helped escort the dead Marine to the other aircraft. The Black Hawk took off, weaving through the air 25 feet off the ground, accelerating into haze.

The corporal was calm as Sergeant Colby cut away his uniform, looking for more wounds. Sergeant Bugh suctioned blood from his mouth. He knew this man would live. But he looked into his dirtied eyes. “Can you see?” he asked.

“No,” the corporal said.

At the trauma center later, the corporal’s eyes reacted to light.

A Race to Treatment

Now the crew was in the air again, this time with the Marine shot in the skull. Sergeant Colby performed CPR. The man had no pulse.

Kneeling beside the man, encased in the roaring whine of the Black Hawk’s dual engines, the sergeants took turns at CPR. Mr. Sempsrott flew at 150 knots — as fast as the aircraft would go.

The helicopter came to a rolling landing at Camp Dwyer. Litter bearers ran the Marine inside.

The flight’s young co-pilot, First Lt. Matthew E. Stewart, loitered in the sudden quiet. He was calmly self-critical. It had been a nerve-racking landing zone, a high-speed approach to evacuate a dying man and a descent into a firefight. He said he had made a new pilot’s mistake.

He had not rolled the aircraft into a steep enough bank as he turned. Then the helicopter’s nose had pitched up. The aircraft had risen, climbing to more than 200 feet from 70 feet and almost floating above a gunfight, exposed.

Mr. Sempsrott had taken the controls and completed the landing. “I was going way too fast for my experience level,” the lieutenant said, humbly.

No one blamed him; this, the crew said, was how young pilots learned. And everyone involved understood the need to move quickly. It was necessary to evade ground fire and to improve a dying patient’s odds.

Beside the helicopter, inside a tent, doctors kept working on the Marine.

Sergeant Colby sat, red-eyed. He had seen the man’s wound. Soon, he knew, the Marine would be moved to the morgue. Morning had not yet come to the United States. In a few hours, the news would reach home.

“A family’s life has been completely changed,” the lieutenant said. “And they don’t even know it yet.”

Barreling Into a Firefight

A few days later, the crew was barreling into Marja again. Another Marine had been shot.

The pilots passed the landing zone, banked and looked down. An Afghan in uniform crawled though dirt. Marines huddled along a ditch. A firefight raged around the green smoke grenade.

The Black Hawk completed its turn, this time low to the ground, and descended. Gunfire could be heard all around. The casualty was not in sight.

“Where is he?” Mr. Sempsrott asked over the radio.

The sergeants dashed for the trees, where a Marine, Cpl. Zachary K. Kruger, was being tended to by his squad. He had been shot in the thigh, near his groin. He could not walk. The patrol had no stretcher.

A hundred yards separated the group from the aircraft, a sprint to be made across the open, on soft soil, under Taliban fire. Sergeant Bugh ran back. Sergeant Colby began firing his M-4 carbine toward the Taliban.

Inside the shuddering aircraft, the pilots tried to radiate calm. They were motionless, vulnerable, sitting upright in plain view.

The Taliban, they knew, had offered a bounty for destroyed American aircraft. Bullets cracked past. The pilots saw their medic return, grab a stretcher, run again for the trees.

They looked this way, then that. Their escort aircraft buzzed low-elevation circles around the zone, gunners leaning out. Bullets kept coming. “Taking fire from the east,” Mr. Sempsrott said.

These are the moments when time slows.

At the airfield, the crews had talked about what propelled them. Some of them mentioned a luxury: They did not wonder, as some soldiers do, if their efforts mattered, if this patrol or that meeting with Afghans or this convoy affected anything in a lasting way.

United Nations Could Hasten Removal of Taliban Leaders From Terror Blacklist (June 13, 2010)
U.S. Military Intelligence Puts Focus on Afghan Graft (June 13, 2010)
Their work could be measured, life by life. They spoke of the infantry, living without comforts in outposts, patrolling in the sweltering heat over ground spiced with hidden bombs and watched over by Afghans preparing complex ambushes. When the Marines called, the air crews said, they needed help.

Now the bullets whipped by.

A Hot Landing Zone

Cobra attack helicopters were en route. Mr. Sempsrott and Lieutenant Stewart had the option of taking off and circling back after the gunships arrived. It would mean leaving their crew on the ground, and delaying the patient’s ride, if only for minutes.

At the tents, Mr. Sempsrott had discussed the choices in a hot landing zone. The discussion ended like this: “I don’t leave people behind.”

More rounds snapped past. “Taking fire from the southeast,” he said.

He looked out. Four minutes, headed to five.

“This is ridiculous,” he said. It was exclamation, not complaint.

His crew broke from the tree line. The Marines and Sergeant Bugh were carrying Corporal Kruger, who craned his neck as they bounced across the field. They fell, found their feet, ran again, fell and reached the Black Hawk and shoved the stretcher in.

A Marine leaned through the open cargo door. He gripped the corporal in a fierce handshake. “We love you, buddy!” he shouted, ducked, and ran back toward the firefight.

Six and a half minutes after landing, the Black Hawk lifted, tilted forward and cleared the vegetation, gaining speed.

Le blessé est évacué alors que l'ennemi est toujours présent.

Corporal Kruger had questions as his blood pooled beneath him.

Where are we going? Camp Dwyer. How long to get there? Ten minutes.

Can I have some water? Sergeant Colby produced a bottle.

After leaving behind Marja, the aircraft climbed to 200 feet and flew level over the open desert, where Taliban fighters cannot hide. The bullet had caromed up and inside the corporal. He needed surgery.

The crew had reached him in time. As the Black Hawk touched down, he sensed he would live.

“Thank you, guys,” he shouted.

“Thank you,” he shouted, and the litter bearers ran him to the medical tent.

The pilots shut the Black Hawk down. Another crew rinsed away the blood. Before inspecting the aircraft for bullet holes, Sergeant Bugh and Sergeant Colby removed their helmets, slipped out of their body armor and gripped each other in a brief, silent hug.

D'où viennent les super-modèles brésiliennes ?

Une beauté tropicale : Gisele Bündchen.

Un reportage vidéo du New York Times répond à cette question.

Réussir une paella

Issu d'une vieille famille juive de New York, Mark Bittman est en charge d'une des chroniques gastronomiques du New York Times. Il nous livre une recette pour réussir la paella à la maison.

Je vous invite à voir ce petit film qui vous donnera envie de vous lancer à l'aventure.

Le restaurant visité par Mark Bittman est l'Alter à Picassent (autre référence, ici), dans la région de Valence.

The Homey Joys Of Simple Paella

YOU wouldn't know it from the elaborate meat-and-shellfish dish in Spanish restaurants, but paella has simple roots. Like most peasant dishes gone ritzy, paella is quite comfortable back in the home kitchen. Indeed, a plain rice-and-shrimp dish can be as much a ''real'' paella as the $25-a-plate version.

The name ''paella'' refers not to a combination of rice, seafood, sausage and other meats, but rather to the paellera, a large pan that looks like a flat wok. The only ingredient common to every traditional paella is rice, which makes sense, since the dish originated in Valencia, Spain's great rice-growing region.

Some argue that true paella must contain either meat or seafood (never both), that it can be prepared only in a paellera or that it must be cooked outdoors over wood. Perhaps they're all right. What's clear to me is that you can produce the fabulous rice dish I call paella in just over a half-hour, which makes it a great option for weeknights. The trick is to start it on the stove and finish it in a superhot oven.

I don't have a paellera, and I'm not about to buy one, so I use a cast-iron skillet. Although I'm a great fan of nonstick cookware, here it would be counterproductive, since one of the great joys of a paella is the crust of rice that forms on the bottom. To encourage that to form, I finish the paella in an oven that is as hot as I can get it, usually on a baking stone for good measure.

The rice must be short or medium grain. Since Valencia rice is not easy to find, I usually use arborio, now sold just about everywhere, or cheaper American or Asian short-grain rice. Saffron is the essential seasoning, and a chicken stock laced with this pungent spice makes the best liquid, although you can substitute a simple stock made from shrimp shells if you like (water is a desperate but acceptable alternative).

Shrimp is my first choice as a featured ingredient, but the alternatives are numerous: chicken, chorizo or other sausage, peas or other vegetables, scallops, pork, firm tofu. Combine them at will: anything less than a half inch thick will cook through by the time the rice absorbs the liquid.

Half of this recipe (in an eight-inch skillet) will make a side dish for four.

THE MINIMALIST'S PAELLA

Time: 30 minutes

4 cups chicken stock (see text)

Pinch saffron

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 medium onion, minced

2 cups short- or medium-grain rice

Salt and fresh black pepper to taste

2 cups raw peeled shrimp, cut into 1/2-inch chunks

Minced parsley for garnish.

1. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees, or as near as you can. Warm the stock in a saucepan with the saffron. Place a 10- or 12-inch skillet over medium-high heat and add the oil. One minute later, add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until translucent, about 5 minutes.

2. Add the rice, and cook, stirring occasionally, until glossy -- just a minute or two. Season liberally with salt and pepper, and add the warmed stock, taking care to avoid the rising steam. Stir in the shrimp, and transfer the pan to the oven.

3. Bake about 25 minutes, until all the liquid is absorbed and the rice is dry on top. Garnish, and serve immediately.

Yield: 4 main-course servings.

Pourquoi le Japon insiste pour chasser la baleine ?

Un baleinier traditionnel côtier du Japon.

C'est un grand mystère.

Pourquoi le Japon, une nation qui dépend de son image auprès des grands marchés internationaux pour vendre ses produits industriels qui permettent à cette grande nation insulaire de vivre, continue-t-il à chasser la baleine dans les eaux australes ?

Le New York Times apporte la réponse dans un excellent article de Martin Fackler qui prouve que ce quotidien, dans des sujets qui ne troublent pas son horizon idéologique, peut faire honneur à la profession de journaliste.

Pour résumer, la pêche à la baleine survit parce qu'elle ne coûte pas grand chose au budget japonais, moins de cent millions d'euros dont une partie non négligeable sert à payer de gras salaires à d'importants bureaucrates.

Donc, pas de grosses économies à espérer de la fin de la chasse subventionnée et des ennuis au parlement où une frange ultranationaliste se sert de cette chasse comme cause sacrée.

En revanche, alors que la viande des cétacés des mères australes s'entasse dans des frigos car elle ne trouve pas de débouchés sur le marché intérieur, la chasse traditionnelle côtière qui prélève des cétacés d'espèces qui ne sont pas en danger, celle-ci se meurt doucement car son sort n'intéresse ni les bureaucrates ni les nationalistes.

Une belle histoire à méditer.

Uncertainty Buffets Japan’s Whaling Fleet


AYUKAWAHAMA, Japan — This small harbor on Japan’s northern coast, where whaling boats sit docked with harpoon guns proudly displayed, and shops sell carvings made from the ivorylike teeth of sperm whales, might seem to be an unlikely place to find opponents of the nation’s contested Antarctic whaling.

Yet, local residents are breaking long-held taboos to speak out against the government-run Antarctic hunts, which they say invite international criticism that threatens the much more limited coastal hunts by people in this traditional whaling town.

“The research whaling in the Antarctic is not about protecting culture,” said Ichio Ishimori, a city councilman in Ishinomaki, of which Ayukawahama is a part.

The Japanese government is facing renewed pressures at home and abroad to drastically scale back its so-called research whaling. Yet, Tokyo seems paralyzed by the same combination of nationalist passions and entrenched bureaucratic interests that have previously blocked any action to limit the three-decade-old whaling program.

“We’re entering a new period on the whaling issue, but we don’t know what it means yet,” said Shohei Yonemoto, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Tokyo.

Clearly, the pressures for change are stronger than ever. The United States and other anti-whaling countries are currently working on a deal that would close loopholes in the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling in exchange for allowing the main whaling nations — Japan, Norway and Iceland — to resume much more limited commercial hunts. They hope for an agreement during the next meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Morocco in June.

Whaling experts and environmentalists were also encouraged when the government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama took charge last year determined to eradicate exactly the sort of outdated, bureaucratic programs that whaling represents.

Tokyo seemed to hint at a compromise in March when the agriculture minister, Hirotaka Akamatsu, whose ministry oversees research whaling, said that Japan was willing to kill fewer whales. But whaling’s opponents and supporters alike in Japan say that it remains politically difficult for Tokyo to accept large reductions in its whale hunts.

While few Japanese these days actually eat whale, criticism of the whale hunts has long been resented here as a form of Western cultural imperialism. During the long tenure of the Liberal Democratic Party, whaling was one of the sacred cows of Japanese politics, embraced by a group of nationalist lawmakers within the party who saw it as a rare issue where Tokyo could appeal to conservatives by waving the flag and saying no to Washington.

The question now is whether Mr. Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan, which swept aside the Liberal Democratic Party in last summer’s elections, will include whaling in its promised housecleaning of Japan’s postwar order. While there is also a group of pro-whaling lawmakers in the new governing party, it is much smaller, with just a few active members.

However, the leader of the group, Tadamasa Kodaira, said in an interview that the Democratic Party was firmly committed to research whaling. Last summer, the party’s election platform included promises to seek a resumption of commercial whaling, though it did not specifically mention the government-run research program.

In an interview, Mr. Kodaira said he recognized that Japan’s whaling industry had shrunk to just a few hundred jobs, mostly paid for by the government. However, he said that the recent aggressive actions of foreign environmental groups like the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which has clashed with Japanese whaling ships near the Antarctic, had fanned popular ire, making it impossible for Tokyo to compromise now.

“We can’t change now because it would look like giving in,” said Mr. Kodaira, a lawmaker from the northern island of Hokkaido. “Will we have to give up tuna next?”

So far, the Democratic Party has left the program untouched. In November, Japan’s whaling fleet left for the Antarctic as scheduled, returning this month with a catch of 507 minke and fin whales, well below the planned take of up to 985 whales, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. The ministry blamed the shortfall on the Sea Shepherd society’s obstructions.

Officials said that one reason the program remained hard to cut was that its budget was so small: only $86 million, of which only $17 million is paid for by the government in cash or zero-interest loans, according to a freelance journalist, Junko Sakuma, who has written extensively about whaling. The rest comes from the sale of whale meat, mostly that of the nonendangered minke whales.

Ayukawahama's whaling fleet is allowed to kill 60 whales.
That means anyone trying to cut the program would risk a huge political outcry from nationalists for only marginal budget savings, all of which creates a huge incentive to do nothing.

The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, one of the most secretive ministries in Japan’s powerful central bureaucracy, has also fiercely resisted any efforts to shrink the program. Among its crucial weapons have been Japanese journalists, who enjoy close ties with the ministry and have tended to dutifully report its claims that research whaling defends Japan’s traditional culture.

Whaling experts say the real reason the ministry wants to keep the program alive is to secure cushy retirement jobs for ministry officials, a common practice that is widely criticized. A study last year by the Democratic Party showed that the Institute of Cetacean Research, a ministry-controlled agency that oversees the research whaling program, reserves jobs for at least five former ministry officials, including one earning an annual salary of more than $130,000. Kyodo Senpaku, a government-owned company that operates the whaling fleet, hires another one.

“Research whaling claims to be protecting science and culture, but it is really just protecting bureaucratic self-interest,” said Atsushi Ishii, a professor of environmental politics at Tohoku University in Sendai. The ministry declined repeated interview requests.

Even its proponents concede that the only real purpose of research whaling is to sustain the shrinking whaling industry, even though much of the meat piles up uneaten in freezers and the last private company dropped out of the Antarctic hunt four years ago. That, in turn, has led to a new round of criticism over the program’s failure to fulfill its own goals of preserving Japan’s whaling industry and traditional whaling culture.

Japan’s coastal whaling is based in four small ports where whale has long been a traditional food item, unlike much of the rest of Japan, where it was added to the menu only after World War II. One of the four is Ayukawahama, in Miyagi Prefecture, a sleepy port of some 4,600 mostly graying residents.

On a recent morning, crews prepared the two identical blue-and-white whaling ships for an annual monthlong hunt in nearby waters, where they are allowed to kill 60 whales, mainly minke. Local residents said Tokyo should negotiate with the International Whaling Commission to allow them to double the size of the coastal hunt, even if it meant giving up the Antarctic program.

“Antarctic whaling does nothing to help this town,” said Yukitaka Chijimatsu, 82, who owns a small shop along the docks where he sells brooches and cellphone straps made from the teeth of sperm whales.

Other local residents said that with fewer people eating whale, the days were numbered for all kinds of whaling and that the government should just let it naturally disappear.

“Japan doesn’t like being told what to do,” said Isao Kondo, 83, who retired near here after a career as a manager at the Japan Whaling Company, now defunct. “But like it or not, whaling is dying.”

Le journalisme n'aime que les faits qui l'arrangent

Pour Mathieu de Taillac, le cas de Santiago Carrillo est hors sujet. Vraiment ?

Hier nous avons relevé les erreurs et omissions de Mathieu de Taillac, journaliste français résidant en Espagne dans son compte rendu pour France Inter de l'affaire Garzon.

Le journaliste se doit de rendre compte des faits tels qu'ils sont et puis, in fine, apporter un commentaire plus personnel si la politique du média le lui permet.

Une liste des victimes de Santiago Carrillo publiée dans la presse de Madrid.

Toutefois, quand il s'agit de sujets à forte charge idéologique, les faits eux-mêmes peuvent se révéler embarrassants. De même que Mathieu de Taillac évoquant la figure du chef communiste Santiago Carrillo s'est bien gardé de révéler aux auditeurs de France Inter que cet homme est un criminel contre l'humanité bien vivant, d'autres journalistes à l'heure de traiter de sujets qui mettent en cause leurs principes idéologiques et moraux, font passer les faits à la trappe.

Un autre cas de partialité journalistique vient à la lumière grâce au magazine en ligne City-Journal qui a signalé le traitement par le New York Times de la question raciale appliquée à la criminalité dans un article typique du traitement sélectif des faits par ce grand quotidien de gauche américain.

Cet article dénonce les pratiques « racistes » de la police de New York laquelle arrête en plus grand nombre les Noirs et les Hispaniques.

Par rapport à leur part dans la criminalité à New York, le taux d'arrestation des Noirs est trop faible.

A aucun moment le journaliste de met en lumière les statistiques qui expliquent les raisons de cette disproportion dans les arrestations : la part de chaque groupe racial dans les crimes commis.

Le New York Times, à l'instar des grands médias américains, analyse la réalité raciale aux Etats-Unis à travers un prisme déformant qui lui interdit d'appréhender les vraies causes des problèmes.

Les conséquences de cet aveuglement de la presse conformiste a de graves conséquences pour la communauté noire. Elle interdit toute prise de conscience et rend impossible toute solution à long terme.

Comment faire en sorte que les jeunes garçons noirs puissent recevoir une éducation si les causes du désastre éducatif dont ils sont les victimes ne sont pas analysées ?

Voici l'excellent article de Heather Mac Donald paru dans le City-Journal qui mérite d'être et lu et médité par tous les journalistes qui visitent ces pages.

Distorting the Truth About Crime and Race The New York Times is at it again.

The New York Times’s front page story this week on the New York Police Department and its allegedly racist stop-and-frisk practices follows a well-worn template: give specific racial breakdowns for every aspect of police behavior, but refer to racial crime rates only in the most attenuated of terms. Disclosing crime rates—the proper benchmark against which police behavior must be measured—would demolish a cornerstone of the Times’s worldview: that the New York Police Department, like police departments across America, oppresses the city’s black population with unjustified racial tactics.

This week’s story, written by Al Baker, began with what the Times thinks is a shocking disparity: “Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in New York City in 2009, but, once stopped, were no more likely to be arrested.” (The fact that blacks, Hispanics, and whites are arrested at the same rate after a stop undercuts, rather than supports, the thesis of racially biased policing, but more on that later.)

The Times’s story includes a graphic breakdown of police stops by race: blacks made up 55 percent of all stops in 2009, though they’re only 23 percent of the city’s population; whites accounted for 10 percent of all stops, though they’re 35 percent of the city’s population; Hispanics made up 32 percent of all stops, though 28 percent of the population, and Asians, 3 percent of all stops and 12 percent of the population. The article details a host of other police actions by specific racial numbers, including arrests, frisks, and use of force.

But when the Times gets around to mentioning crime rates, more than halfway into the piece, it does so only because the NYPD raises them in its defense, not because the Times deems them independently worthy of note in a story on police stops. And it mentions them only as a form of reported speech, in the most generalized of terms: “Mr. Browne, the department spokesman, . . . said the stops mirrored crime—that while a large percentage of the stops involved blacks, an even larger percentage of violent crimes involved suspects described as black by their victims.” This formula, which carefully brackets a non-specific statement about crime rates as what the police department says, as opposed to simply what the facts are, is by now standard Times practice:

February 11, 2010: “Police officials have said that while a large percentage of the street stops involve blacks, an even larger percentage of crimes involve suspects described as black by their victims.”

May 13, 2009: “On Tuesday, Mr. Browne said that the stops ‘comport by race proportionally with descriptions provided by crime victims.’”

February 11, 2009: “The police have said that while a large percentage of the stops involve black people, an even larger percentage of crimes involve suspects described as black by their victims.”

May 6, 2008: “The police have said that while a large percentage of the street stops involve black people, an even larger percentage of crimes involve suspects described as black by their victims.”

Only in 2007 did the Times disclose some actual black crime rates in discussing stop-and-frisk activity—though as usual, only as an aspect of the NYPD’s defense of itself, and only by attributing those crime rates to what the police “say,” as if they were a matter of opinion, unlike the stop-and-frisk rates, which the paper reports as a fact so indisputable that it does not need a source. That 2007 slip has never been allowed to reappear, however; the disclosure of crime rates has been purged from all subsequent Times stories on the NYPD’s stop activities. The actual numbers convey the shocking magnitude of the city’s crime disparities with a vividness that a mere generalized statement about a “larger percentage of crimes than stops” cannot, which is why the numbers are almost always left out. The actual crime rates reveal that blacks are being significantly understopped, compared with their representation in the city’s criminal population, another reason for omitting them from the paper’s reporting.

Here are the crime data that the Times doesn’t want its readers to know: blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 (though they were only 55 percent of all stops and only 23 percent of the city’s population). Blacks committed 80 percent of all shootings in the first half of 2009. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, committed 5 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009, though they are 35 percent of the city’s population (and were 10 percent of all stops). They committed 1.8 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies. The face of violent crime in New York, in other words, like in every other large American city, is almost exclusively black and brown. Any given violent crime is 13 times more likely to be committed by a black than by a white perpetrator—a fact that would have been useful to include in the Times’s lead, which stated that “Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped.” These crime data are not some artifact that the police devise out of their skewed racial mindset. They are what the victims of those crimes—the vast majority of whom are minority themselves—report to the police.


You cannot properly analyze police behavior without analyzing crime. Crime is what drives NYPD tactics; it is the basis of everything the department does. And crime, as reported by victims and witnesses, sends police overwhelmingly to minority neighborhoods, because that’s where the vast majority of crime occurs—by minority criminals against minority victims.

The Times’s analysis, by contrast, which follows in lock step with the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, assumes that policing should mirror census data. The only numerical benchmark that the Times provides for the NYPD’s stop data is the city’s population ratios. According to this analysis, since whites are 35 percent of the city’s population, they should be 35 percent of police stops, even though they commit only 5 percent of all violent crimes. But using census data as a benchmark for policing is as nonsensical as it would be to use census data for fire department activity. If a particular census tract has a disproportionate number of fires, and another census tract has none, no one expects the FDNY to send out fire trucks to non-existent fires in the fire-free census tract just for the sake of equal representation.

The proactive policing revolution that began under NYPD Commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1994 declared that the police would actually lower crime—an unheard-of idea in the annals of policing. To accomplish that feat, the department began rigorously scrutinizing crime data on a daily basis and deploying officers to crime hot spots. Once there, officers were expected to be on the look-out for suspicious behavior. If there had been a string of robberies at ATMs in East Flatbush, for example, and an officer saw two guys apparently casing an ATM user from across the street, who then walked quickly away when they spotted the uniform, the officer was expected to stop and question the two men. If thieves had been preying on senior citizens in Harlem, someone walking closely behind a retiree in the 28th precinct and looking furtively over his shoulder would likely be stopped by an officer deployed there in response to the crime spike. Those stops may not have resulted in an arrest, if no evidence of a crime were found, but they may have disrupted a crime in the making.

This data-driven, proactive style of policing, which came to be known as Compstat, led to the largest crime drop in recent memory. The biggest returns were in New York’s minority neighborhoods, because that’s where crime was and still is the highest. Blacks and Hispanics have made up 79 percent of the 78 percent decline in homicide victims since 1990. Over 10,000 black and Hispanic males are alive today who would have been dead had homicide rates remained at early 1990s levels.

The Times’s article is filled with the usual NYPD critics. There’s Donna Lieberman and Christopher Dunn from the New York Civil Liberties Union, Darius Charney from the Center for Constitutional Rights (which is suing the department over its stop policies), Jeffrey Fagan from Columbia University law school, and “researchers” from the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. These critics’ understanding of policing and crime is quixotic, to put it kindly. At a panel on stop and frisks at the New York City Bar Association this March (in which I participated), Fagan proposed the Chicago Police Department, which does not use proactive stops, as a model of policing that the NYPD should emulate. Fagan did not mention that New York City’s homicide rate is two-fifths that of Chicago, and that juveniles in the Windy City under the age of 17 are killed at four times the rate of those in New York, an epidemic of youth killings so severe as to prompt an emergency visit from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder last October. The director of John Jay’s Center on Race, Crime and Justice maintains that because the absolute number of homicides committed nationally by blacks, on the one hand, and whites and Hispanics, on the other, is roughly the same (though blacks commit more), there is no black crime problem.

The Times, however, did not consult any minority supporters of Compstat policing to get their perspective on whether the police are bearing down too hard in high-crime neighborhoods. A good place to start would have been a police-community meeting in East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, or other any high-crime area. Here is what the reporter would have heard from community members: “We want more officers, we want more arrests, we want the dealers off the corner.” The police cannot respond to these heartfelt requests for public safety without generating disproportionate stop data that can be used against them in a racial profiling law suit. If a grandmother in a public housing project calls the police about the young drug dealers in her lobby, a properly responsive officer is going to question the youths hanging out there. The officer is not “profiling” the youths; he is responding to a citizen request for action. But the NYCLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights will tally all those stops against the police as evidence of “racial profiling.” The police aren’t getting calls from Riverdale residents about the young gang members congregating on the corner or in their lobby. If they were, the police would respond the same way that they do in Harlem: by finding legal grounds to stop the gang members and let them know that they’re being watched. (For the record, the paper cited me as the other voice besides the NYPD spokesman supporting the department’s stop tactics.)

Contrary to the Times’s assumption, the fact that an identical proportion of stops of whites and blacks—10 percent—results in an arrest or summons strongly suggests that the police use the identical quantum of reasonable suspicion in stopping whites and blacks. The police stop a greater absolute number of blacks because the overwhelming majority of crime, suspicious behavior, and calls to respond to crime occurs in black neighborhoods.

Given the vast disproportion in the city’s crime rates, you can either have policing that goes after crime and saves minority lives, or you can have policing that mirrors the city’s census data. You cannot have both. If the NYPD responds to the incessant pressure from the Times and the city’s anti-cop activists to conform its policing activity to population rates, the law-abiding residents of high-crime neighborhoods will be hurt the most.

The Times’s radically incomplete front-page story, like so many that preceded it, only makes the NYPD’s job more difficult. It fuels the animosity against the police that makes witnesses less likely to cooperate with officers and suspects more likely to resist arrest. It is crime, not race, that leads to more stops in minority neighborhoods. The crime disparities in the city are deeply troubling, and thus have been regarded as taboo. But until those crime rates are acknowledged, reporting on police activity through an incomplete racial lens will continue to defame the NYPD and mislead the public about its work.


Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal, the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of Are Cops Racist? How the War Against the Police Harms Black Americans.

La vérité historique s'impose aux Noirs

Dans cet article du New York Times de ce matin, Henry Louis Gates, professeur à l'université de Harvard écrit noir sur blanc un fait historique que les Afro-Américains ne veulent pas encore admettre : la mise en esclavage de leurs ancêtres n'a rien à voir avec les Blancs. Ce sont leurs frères de race qui les ont placés en servitude pour les vendre aux commerçants européens.

Avec quelques exceptions, à l'inverse des marchands musulmans, les Européens n'ont pas capturé et mis en esclavage des populations africaines.

C'est bien que le New York Times le publie.

Cela contribue à raffermir ma croyance dans les miracles.

Ending the Slavery Blame-Game

THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.

There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.

While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.

For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.

How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.

The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves. “The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia,” he warned. “We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”

To be sure, the African role in the slave trade was greatly reduced after 1807, when abolitionists, first in Britain and then, a year later, in the United States, succeeded in banning the importation of slaves. Meanwhile, slaves continued to be bought and sold within the United States, and slavery as an institution would not be abolished until 1865. But the culpability of American plantation owners neither erases nor supplants that of the African slavers. In recent years, some African leaders have become more comfortable discussing this complicated past than African-Americans tend to be.

In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold example.

Our new understanding of the scope of African involvement in the slave trade is not historical guesswork. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, directed by the historian David Eltis of Emory University, we now know the ports from which more than 450,000 of our African ancestors were shipped out to what is now the United States (the database has records of 12.5 million people shipped to all parts of the New World from 1514 to 1866). About 16 percent of United States slaves came from eastern Nigeria, while 24 percent came from the Congo and Angola.

Through the work of Professors Thornton and Heywood, we also know that the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups. This data, along with the tracing of blacks’ ancestry through DNA tests, is giving us a fuller understanding of the identities of both the victims and the facilitators of the African slave trade.

For many African-Americans, these facts can be difficult to accept. Excuses run the gamut, from “Africans didn’t know how harsh slavery in America was” and “Slavery in Africa was, by comparison, humane” or, in a bizarre version of “The devil made me do it,” “Africans were driven to this only by the unprecedented profits offered by greedy European countries.”

But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts.

Did these Africans know how harsh slavery was in the New World? Actually, many elite Africans visited Europe in that era, and they did so on slave ships following the prevailing winds through the New World. For example, when Antonio Manuel, Kongo’s ambassador to the Vatican, went to Europe in 1604, he first stopped in Bahia, Brazil, where he arranged to free a countryman who had been wrongfully enslaved.

African monarchs also sent their children along these same slave routes to be educated in Europe. And there were thousands of former slaves who returned to settle Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Middle Passage, in other words, was sometimes a two-way street. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to claim that Africans were ignorant or innocent.

Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.

So how could President Obama untangle the knot? In David Remnick’s new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” one of the president’s former students at the University of Chicago comments on Mr. Obama’s mixed feelings about the reparations movement: “He told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations. But in practice he didn’t think it was really workable.”

About the practicalities, Professor Obama may have been more right than he knew. Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization. And reaching that understanding is a vital precursor to any just and lasting agreement on the divisive issue of slavery reparations.

Une base de données à découvrir sur la traite Atlantique.

Cinq minutes de guerre et un tireur d'élite ennemi

Le journaliste du New York Times C. J. Chivers a accompagné des Marines en opérations. La routine et les drames de la « vraie guerre ». Un reportage vidéo de grande qualité.

Le reportage texte est ici.

Un fusil de tireur d'élite taliban, fabriqué en 1942 au Canada.

Firsthand Look at Firefights in Marja


During the initial American-led assault earlier this year into Marja, the last large Taliban-dominated population center in Helmand Province, Marines in several companies encountered something unusual in the American experience of the Afghan war – insurgent snipers.

For several days, and in several places, competent and deliberate marksmen fired on Marine patrols. A video today presents one such event, a firefight between the Marines of Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, and Taliban fighters, including at least one Taliban gunman the Marines considered to be a sniper. The footage shows the effects of incoming gunfire that is much different from the normal experience of Afghan shooting.

The Ineffectiveness of Taliban Riflery

Now and then over the years, there have been reports of well-trained Taliban marksmen in different parts of the country. But credible reports have been few. Taliban rifle fire, in the main, has been largely ineffective.

How ineffective? Through April 3, the number of American troops killed by gunshot wounds in the entire war in Afghanistan, according to the casualty summaries compiled by the Defense Manpower Data Center, had reached 188. That includes wounds caused not just by rifle fire, but also by the more powerful PK machine guns and any other firearm present in the war.

This number — 188 — merits consideration, for what it tells us about the Afghan war and much of the public conversation about it. To put things in perspective, fewer American troops have died of gunshot wounds in more than eight-and-a-half years of war in Afghanistan than in almost any single month at the height of the war in Vietnam. Many factors contribute to this – better medical care in the minutes after injury (the so-called golden hour); improved body armor and helmets; the prevalence of bullet-proof plates and glass on most American military ground vehicles; the longer ranges of typical engagements in lightly vegetated Afghan environments, as opposed to the short ranges that were common in engagements in tropical jungles and deltas; the Taliban’s shift to a greater emphasis on explosives, including against foot patrols; and others.

Yes, the comparison is imprecise, for reasons both obvious and subtle. Troop-strength levels for both sides were higher in Vietnam (there is no Taliban equivalent of the massing of N.V.A. battalions south of the demilitarized zone, and nothing remotely like Tet), and the lethality of bullet wounds to American troops has declined sharply in recent years, compared with the experiences of past wars. Yet the raw data is still remarkable. It serves to keep this war in martial perspective. And it underscores that impressions created by much of the public chatter about the Taliban as a fighting force – they are natural fighters, the fighting is constant, come warm weather they will be back strong in the “spring offensive” etc. – often do not align with what the war actually looks like on the ground, and need fine-tuning.

Enter the Snipers

Taliban gunmen have been adept at exerting influence over the Afghan population. They are an enduring and effective political force. Their numbers seem large and their support substantial. They are skilled at intelligence collection, and have integrated bomb-making and emplacement into their operations. But their success as gunfighters against the American military has been episodic, as in Wanat, and local, as in the Korangal Valley, and often related to questionable tactical choices by American commanders as much as to Taliban skill. In all, the Taliban’s gunmen have proved to be a modest threat.

Enter the snipers, who are an exception.

In recent months, there have been cases of better Taliban marksmen harassing American patrols and wounding and killing American troops. The operations in and near Marja were a prominent example. The phenomenon deserves closer examination, to try to gain a richer perspective than is often possible while reporting in the midst of fighting.

Let’s look at what is known.

First, what exactly is meant by “sniper”? Like many terms used to discuss war fighting, this is a slippery word. In the context of Afghan fighting, American troops tend to talk about a sniper when they encounter an insurgent rifleman who is obviously more skilled and disciplined than the norm, someone who fires with reasonable accuracy at medium and longish ranges, usually using a rifle-and-ammunition combination that can be effective out to 400 or 500 meters or more. But while the Taliban’s “snipers” are not the usual class of Kalashnikov-carrying Afghan fighter, they typically are not what a conventional soldier might think of in relation to the term.

The available evidence suggests that many of them are not highly trained shooters, with advanced optics, premium ammunition and precision high-powered rifles, who can be reasonably expected to hit a man with a single shot at 700 or 800 or 1,000 meters or more. One way to understand them, based on the experience of Marja, is to say that these better gunmen could usually hit a sheet of plywood at 400 yards, but most of them could not hit a sheet of copy paper at that range. This is very good shooting for Afghanistan. It’s not especially impressive shooting by a higher standard. (Note: A few Taliban marksmen can hit a sheet of paper from 400 yards. One fighter with that level of skill is the Taliban gunman in the video.)

The Rifles

Second, how are they equipped? Kilo Company’s battlefield collections, along with reviews of recent photographs of armed Taliban fighters and information shared by an officer who gathered data from across Helmand Province, offer insights. Among the captured rifles were two variants of the Lee-Enfield rifle line. These are bolt-action rifles with design roots reaching to the late 19th century, when conventional armies favored heavier, long-barreled rifles that fired more powerful ammunition than what is predominant in military use today.

One of the rifles had been manufactured at the Long Branch arsenal in Toronto in 1942. The other was manufactured at the Government Rifle Factory in Ishapore, India; its date was not clear. Photographs of the Taliban have also shown a few of their gunmen carrying old Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifles. These were a similar czarist (then Soviet) arm of the same era.

These rifles belong to class of weapon often referred to as “battle rifles” and differ markedly from the assault rifles in widespread circulation today. They have longer effective ranges, are less concealable and fire heavier bullets than assault rifles. The shooter loads them manually, by manipulating a bolt that ejects the spent cartridge and then slides the next cartridge into place; they have no automatic or semiautomatic features.

Battle rifles have had their champions for decades, in part because their slower rate of fire keeps ammunition consumption low and encourages disciplined aiming, but also because they were manufactured for much of the 20th century in large quantities in several countries. Their abundance meant that after the shift by most conventional forces to assault rifles — which began on a small scale in Hitler’s army and by the 1960s and 1970s was spreading through conventional armies most everywhere — the old battle rifles, which gradually fell from service, became available in huge surpluses and at inexpensive prices. They are also well suited to desert fighting or any other shooting involving open vistas, because of their longer effective ranges. Not surprisingly, Lee-Enfields were distributed to the Afghan anti-Soviet resistance by the C.I.A., via the Pakistani intelligence service, in the early 1980s. They also can still be found on arms markets. In the opening of the Marja assault, it was clear on many days as bullets passed by that these kinds of weapons, or similar ones, were in use by the Taliban. The round makes a distinctly different sound. The battlefield collections then confirmed the hunch.

The Ammunition and the Shooting

Third, the ammunition. Caches in Marja turned up ammunition – dated Mark 7 British .303 cartridges from several different factories — that matched Lee-Enfield rifles. In two caches captured by Kilo Company, some of the British .303 cartridges dated to 1941.

Many held bullets that were jacketed in steel – which marked them as original British World War II-production ammunition from Churchill’s time. (The British used steel for bullet jackets to save copper and zinc for other wartime uses.) A small portion of the ammunition in the sample appeared to have been older still — a few cartridges were round-nosed Mark 6 rounds, which British forces were phasing out before the First World War.

Last, several rounds were 7.62×54R cartridges, which match Russian Mosin-Nagant rifles or the SVD line, the Soviet-designed semiautomatic sniper rifles of the former Eastern bloc that were often used by insurgent snipers in Iraq. (Curiously, there are very few recent reports or images of SVD rifles in Afghanistan. They are not absent from the war. But they seem not to be widely used. This is in some ways surprising, considering the expansive distribution in Afghanistan of the standard arms of the former Eastern bloc – the AK, PK, DshK and Makarov lines, as well as 82-millimeter mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and F1 pineapple-style hand grenades.)

Fourth, the shooting itself. Often the Taliban’s snipers fired near misses, one after another, separated by 30 seconds or more. Mixed with the incoming automatic fire, the firefights in Marja would be punctuated by the occasional single round that would pass by just overheard, or thump into the soil or at a door frame or the surface of a wall beside a Marine. These rounds were attention-getting, to say the least. At times, and the video captures some of this, it appeared that more than one Taliban fighter with battle rifle was firing, which may have signaled not so much the presence of a single “true” sniper, but that some of these Taliban units had multiple fighters who preferred to carry Lee-Enfields. This might make them no different from the American grunts who prefer to carry M-14s, arguing that their larger cartridges have greater range and stopping power than the rounds fired by the M-4 and M-16 line, and thus have a real value in Afghan fighting.

But among whoever was firing on the Marines, there were several instances of skilled and accurate shooting. The officer who gathered data (and asked not to be named here) said there were times during the operation when a Taliban sniper killed a Marine, as well as instances in which Marines survived after being hit on their bullet-proof plates or, once, after a glancing shot that hit a helmet. In Kilo Company, the Marines present in several engagements also felt that at least one of the Taliban gunmen shooting at them in this particular area might have had a telescopic sight. Their feeling was that the distances were long enough that it would be hard to make shots like this with the naked eye. Moreover, the day after I recorded the video footage above, an Afghan National Army soldier was killed while walking in the open during a lull in fighting. He was felled by a single shot, at a range the Marines estimated at 500 to 700 meters, and the bullet struck his neck. Whoever made that shot was, absent extraordinary good luck, not the run-of-the-mill Taliban fighter.

What does it all mean? To gain some distance on this, broader casualty numbers are again helpful. But we’re out of space for today. Tomorrow we’ll publish data that put the snipers of Helmand Province in a fuller context. We’ll for now hint at what the statistics seem to show: Taliban fighters with traditional battle rifles have made Helmand Province more dangerous. They present an interesting phenomenon, and bear close watching. On the national level, they do not appear to mark a profound shift in the war.

That’s not to say that they do not create harrowing moments. As the video shows, Lance Cpl. Travis Vuocolo was a very lucky man.

Le New York Times et les races humaines

A droite, M. Gaines qui choisit de gagner sa vie par des attaques à main armée. Mais il ne fut pas assez malin pour échapper à la justice. Après 13 années passées en prison, il retrouve ses fils Shane et Adam lesquels expliquent leur échec scolaire par l'absence de leur père.

Le New York Times a un gros problème avec les races humaines. Il lui est difficile de ne pas rendre compte de la criminalité aux Etats-Unis et de son impact sur la communauté noire. Pourtant, il réussit à chaque fois à décrire le phénomène sans en tirer les conclusions qui s'imposent à tout spécialiste et tout simplement à tout lecteur doté d'un minimum de bon sens.

Cette fois, il s'intéresse au sort des enfants des détenus de droit commun. Il aboutit à la conclusion que les enfants de ces détenus ont bien plus de chances de devenir des criminels à leur tour. Conclusion du journalisme : c'est l'incarcération des pères qui conduit les enfants à la marginalisation sociale et au crime.

Recommandation implicite du New York Times : libérer les pères pour que les enfants ne deviennent pas des criminels à leur tour.

C'est l'exemple même de pensée de gauche qui devient folle.

Pourtant, si autant d'enfants noirs ont des pères en prison c'est tout d'abord parce que leurs géniteurs ont choisi un mode de vie criminel.

Il faut donc s'interroger sur la dérive des jeunes noirs et sur l'impact des discours victimistes dont ils sont abreuvés et dont cet article est un exemple parfait.

Le cas de Terrisa Bryant est particulièrement frappant. Pourquoi est-elle tombé enceinte à 14 ans ? La faute à son père. Celui-ci étant en prison, sa mère devait travailler de longues heures pour nourrir la famille et la miss Bryant a contribué à la vie de la famille en s'occupant de ses frères et sœurs à la place de sa maman. Ne pouvant sortir avec ses amis pour faire la fête, la miss Bryant s'est sentie exclue et ce sentiment a nourri une colère et une frustration qu'elle a voulu compenser en se faisant engrosser par le premier venu.

Cette situation tragique de la communauté noire, que l'aveuglement idéologique de la classe dominante contribue à empirer, se retrouve aussi de manière croissante dans les couches les plus défavorisées de la communauté blanche. Une sorte de quart-monde où se recrute la majorité des criminels blancs. Dans cette population, la criminalité est aussi un phénomène qui se reproduit de génération en génération.

Enfin, n'oublions pas de mentionner le facteur explicatif que le New York Times ne veut jamais prendre en compte : le QI des populations criminogènes, blanches comme noires.

In Prisoners’ Wake, a Tide of Troubled Kids Adam

The circumstances were not promising. Mr. Scott, 20, was awaiting sentencing for drug possession and robbery, but he was allowed supervised release from jail in May to attend a job preparation class — a chance to turn his life around. As he spoke, he wriggled his neck, trying to get used to the necktie required, and he tried to ignore the tracking device on his ankle.

“I had low self-esteem and depression,” Mr. Scott said of his teenage years. Now, his ex-girlfriend was pregnant, and he pondered his child’s prospects.

“I want to be there for this child, and I want the child to know that jail ain’t no place to be,” he said.

The chances of seeing a parent go to prison have never been greater, especially for poor black Americans, and new research is documenting the long-term harm to the children they leave behind. Recent studies indicate that having an incarcerated parent doubles the chance that a child will be at least temporarily homeless and measurably increases the likelihood of physically aggressive behavior, social isolation, depression and problems in school — all portending dimmer prospects in adulthood.

“Parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel, and distinctly American, childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents,” said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who is studying what some now call the “incarceration generation.”

Incarceration rates in the United States have multiplied over the last three decades, in part because of stiffer sentencing rules. At any given moment, more than 1.5 million children have a parent, usually their father, in prison, according to federal data. But many more are affected over the course of childhood, especially if they are black, new studies show.

Among those born in 1990, one in four black children, compared with one in 25 white children, had a father in prison by age 14. Risk is concentrated among black children whose parents are high-school dropouts; half of those children had a father in prison, compared with one in 14 white children with dropout parents, according to a report by Dr. Wildeman recently published in the journal Demography.

For both blacks and whites, the chances of parental incarceration were far higher than they were for children born just 12 years earlier, in 1978.

Scholars agree that in some cases children may benefit from a parent’s forced removal, especially when a father is a sexual predator or violent at home. But more often, the harm outweighs any benefits, studies have found.

If a parent’s imprisonment deprives a struggling family of earnings or child support, the practical consequences can be fairly clear-cut. While poor urban children had a 3 percent chance of experiencing a period of homelessness over the previous year, those with an incarcerated parent had a 6 percent chance, one study found.

Quantifying other effects of parental incarceration, like aggressive behavior and depression, is more complex because many children of prisoners are already living in deprived and turbulent environments. But researchers using newly available surveys that follow families over time are starting to home in on the impact.

Among 5-year-old urban boys, 49 percent of those who had a father incarcerated within the previous 30 months exhibited physically aggressive behaviors like hitting others or destroying objects, compared with 38 percent of those in otherwise similar circumstances who did not have a father imprisoned, Dr. Wildeman found.

While most attention has been placed on physical aggression, a study by Sara Wakefield, a sociologist following children in Chicago, found that having a parent imprisoned was a mental-health tipping point for some. Thus, while 28 percent of the children in her study over all experienced feelings of social isolation, depression or anxiety at levels that would warrant clinical evaluation or treatment, about 35 percent of those who had an incarcerated parent did.

Such hidden issues can have lifelong consequences.

Terrisa Bryant, 20, who was in the same jobs class as Mr. Scott, with a group called Strive, said she grew up resenting her father’s absences, including his time spent in prison. With her mother working day and night to put food on the table, Ms. Bryant was the baby sitter for her younger siblings.

“I couldn’t go out,” Ms. Bryant said. “I felt isolated.”

Ms. Bryant said she thought her anger and isolation helped explain why she got pregnant at 14 and had to drop out of school to raise her child. Now, she hopes to get certified for a career in child care.

With financial woes now forcing many states to rethink the relentless expansion of prisons, “this intergenerational transfer of problems should be included as an additional cost of incarceration to society,” said Sarah S. McLanahan, a sociologist at Princeton University and director of a national survey of families that is providing data for many of the new studies.

Heather Mac Donald, a legal expert at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, agreed that everything possible should be done to help the children of people who were incarcerated. But Ms. Mac Donald said that it was hard to distinguish the effects of having a parent in prison from those of having a parent who is a criminal, and that any evaluation of tough sentencing policies, which she supports, had to weigh the benefits for the larger community. “A large portion of fathers were imprisoned on violence or drug-trafficking charges,” she said. “What would be the effects on other children in the neighborhood if those men are out there?”

Adam Gaines, 40, of Owings Mills, Md., has firsthand experience of watching his children flounder. He was freed last year after 13 and a half years in prison for robbery. Now, he is trying to be the father he never was to a son who dropped out of school in the 10th grade, another son who is just starting high school and a teenage daughter who had a baby and dropped out of school.

Mr. Gaines shook his heroin addiction after years in prison, has moved back in with his wife, Tasuha, and is studying to be a fitness teacher.

When his father was behind bars, said Mr. Gaines’s oldest child, Adam Jr., 19, “I didn’t have a role model, and I had to learn on the streets how to carry myself, what it meant to be a man.”

Mr. Scott, too, may not be around for his child. Despite his vow to break the cycle of failure and his job preparation class, he disappeared shortly after talking to a reporter in May, apparently to avoid a mandatory drug test, and did not report to his probation officer.

Mr. Scott was arrested on charges of absconding in the last week of May and is now in a Washington jail awaiting a sentence that could be three years or more — and making it more likely that his child, too, will join the incarceration generation.

Crise économique : et si Hitler avait raison ?

Délégation française à la conférence internationale de 1931 qui ne put se mettre d'accord sur les mesures à prendre pour combattre les effets de la crise économique.

Voilà l'étonnante question posée par David Leonhardt du New York Times dans le cadre de la controverse entre Américains et Européens sur les mesures à prendre pour sortir de la crise économique.

Dans un article, le journaliste rappelle que les mesures de relance peuvent remettre en fonctionnement une économie et il appelle à la rescousse… Adolf Hitler !

David Leonhardt.

In the summer of 1933, just as they will do on Thursday, heads of government and their finance ministers met in London to talk about a global economic crisis. They accomplished little and went home to battle the crisis in their own ways.

More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.

The economic benefits of this vast works program never flowed to most workers, because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining. But Germany did escape the Great Depression faster than other countries. Corporate profits boomed, and unemployment sank (and not because of slave labor, which didn’t become widespread until later). Harold James, an economic historian, says that the young liberal economists studying under John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s began to debate whether Hitler had solved unemployment.

No sane person enjoys mixing nuance and Nazis, but this bit of economic history has a particular importance this week. In the run-up to the G-20 meeting, European leaders have resisted calls for more government spending. Last week, the European Union president, Mirek Topolanek, echoed a line from AC/DC — whom he had just heard in concert — and described the Obama administration’s stimulus plan as “a road to hell.”

Here in the United States, many people are understandably wondering whether the $800 billion stimulus program will make much of a difference. They want to know: Does stimulus work? Fortunately, this is one economic question that’s been answered pretty clearly in the last century.

Yes, stimulus works.

When governments have taken aggressive steps to soften an economic decline, they have succeeded. The Germans did it in the 1930s. Franklin D. Roosevelt did so more haltingly, and had more halting results. Even the limp Japanese recovery plan of the 1990s makes the case. Although dithering over a bank rescue kept Japan in a slump, government spending on roads and bridges made things better than they otherwise would have been.

No matter what happens in London on Thursday, President Obama and other world leaders are sure to claim the meeting as a success. (“I do not regard the economic conference as a failure,” Roosevelt said in 1933.)

But if the meeting is going to be an actual success, it will have to do more than put a happy face on trans-Atlantic disagreements. It will need to begin nudging the discussion about stimulus toward a more accurate reading of history.

The Americans and Europeans aren’t really as far apart as Mr. Topolanek’s AC/DC homage suggests. Europe is doing less than the United States, but the gap isn’t huge. It just seems so because European stimulus tends to arrive quietly, from existing safety net programs. In this country, where the safety net is weaker, stimulus comes largely from new laws.

Yet the rhetoric from Europe — even the more subdued recent remarks, like those of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — still creates a problem. Stimulus skepticism today will make it harder to pass more stimulus tomorrow. And more will probably be needed.

George Soros, the billionaire investor who was born in Budapest and works in New York, came to Washington last week and captured both the problem and the potential for a solution. “I think they can be brought around,” he said of the Europeans. “I am actually hopeful something constructive can happen.”

The objections to stimulus tend to come in two forms: Its costs are too high, and its benefits too small.

Mr. Topolanek and German officials have been pressing the first argument. They say that the additional government spending can lead to inflation and government debt. The Weimar Republic of the 1920s, where inflation helped lead to Hitler’s rise, casts a long shadow.

Stimulus opponents here in the United States — mainly Congressional Republicans (though not, tellingly, Republican governors of some large states) — have been warning about debt, too. But they have also been making the second argument. When the government spends money, they say, it simply displaces spending by the private sector. Republicans on Capitol Hill have taken to citing a recent book by the journalist Amity Shlaes, “The Forgotten Man,” which claims the New Deal didn’t work.

Theoretically, neither of these arguments is crazy. But they don’t have much evidence on their side.

The best takedown of Ms. Shlaes’s thesis came from Eric Rauchway, a historian, who pointed out that her favorite statistic did not count people employed by New Deal programs to be employed. Excluding the effects of the medicine, the patient is as sick as ever!

When Roosevelt stuck to a stimulus program, unemployment fell markedly, and the biggest stimulus of all — World War II — did the rest. It’s true that economic models say the economy shouldn’t work this way. When resources are sitting idle, businesses should find a way to use them profitably. But they often don’t.

People become irrationally pessimistic during a downturn. They are driven by what Keynes called animal spirits. Only government can typically change the dynamic.

Could the government spending eventually lead to inflation and crippling debts? Absolutely. But the mistakes of the last 80 years have gone in the other direction. During the Great Depression, Japan’s lost decade, the Asian financial crisis and even the last 18 months, governments didn’t act aggressively enough. Deflation and lack of growth ended up being the real risks.

These are precisely the risks facing the world economy now. In Spain, prices are already falling. Layoffs are still mounting around the world. Financial firms have more losses to acknowledge.

Given the diminished standing of the United States, Mr. Obama won’t be able to get the Europeans to fall in line behind him this week. But he can still make progress. He and the American delegation can, in gentle terms, ask the Europeans to live up to their own standard — and remind them of their self-interest.

Two weeks ago, responding to criticism, an executive of the European Central Bank wrote a letter to an Italian newspaper claiming, “fiscal stimulus in European countries is wholly comparable to that seen in the United States.” That simply isn’t true, as the chart at right makes clear. The difference amounts to about $200 billion over three years.

Because the global economy is in many ways integrated, Europe can benefit from American stimulus without pulling its own weight. But because the global economy isn’t completely integrated, European stimulus would still help Europe more than anywhere else. And that presents the American delegation with perhaps its most persuasive case.

Right now, Eastern Europe appears to be one of the world’s most vulnerable places. It is a relatively poor region, where the population is disaffected and where the economy is shrinking rapidly. In both Estonia and Latvia, the gross domestic product fell 10 percent last year.

At the G-20, the leaders of the richer European countries will be asking the world to help Eastern Europe. By all means, the world should help. But Europe should reconsider its part, too.