Ola Wnuczek, a 6-years old Polish girl tries to find her mother. The mother Małgorzata Wnuczek left Poland in 2005 to work in Leicester, the United Kingdom. She has never been seen after 2006.

More information about the missing woman Małgorzata Wnuczek on www.missingpeople.org.uk 

Wild Horses of Newbury from Man Of The Woods on Vimeo.

Guardian: One in four men in South Africa have admitted to rape and many confess to attacking more than one victim, according to a study that exposes the country’s endemic culture of sexual violence.

Three out of four rapists first attacked while still in their teens, the study found. One in 20 men said they had raped a woman or girl in the last year.

South Africa is notorious for having one of the highest levels of rape in the world. Only a fraction are reported, and only a fraction of those lead to a conviction.

The study into rape and HIV, by the country’s Medical Research Council (MRC), asked men to tap their answers into a Palm Pilot device to guarantee anonymity. The method appears to have produced some unusually frank responses.

Professor Rachel Jewkes of the MRC, who carried out the research, said: “We have a very, very high prevalence of rape in South Africa. I think it is down to ideas about masculinity based on gender hierarchy and the sexual entitlement of men. It’s rooted in an African ideal of manhood.”

Jewkes and her colleagues interviewed a representative sample of 1,738 men in South Africa’s Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces.
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Haaretz: By honoring novelist and Nazi-sympathizer Knut Hamsun, Norway has damaged the international Holocaust education drive that it has recently been appointed to head, campaigners against anti-Semitism told Haaretz. Yet, the leader of Norway’s Jewish community disagrees.

In March, Norway assumed chairmanship of the 26-nation Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education in the midst of celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Knut Hamsun, the country’s once celebrated author who was shunned for supporting Norway’s Nazi occupation regime during World War II.

The government has honored the novelist with celebrations, a commemorative coin and is allocating millions of dollars toward building a cultural center in the Nobel Prize laureate’s hometown, which is to open in August.

Hamsun, who died impoverished at the age of 92 in 1952 (the government stripped him of his property) once gave his Nobel Prize medal in literature as a gift to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. He also met Adolf Hitler in Bavaria. The author of masterpieces like “Hunger,” Hamsun is cherished by readers in Norway and around the world.
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Telegraph: In a letter from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, was told that he had less than a month to provide written undertakings that the party would abide by race relations legislation.

John Wadham, legal director of the Commission, said that the watchdog was concerned that the BNP’s constitution and membership criteria could be in breach of the law.

Party membership was said by the Commission to be restricted to those with white skin and a small number of other ethnic groups.

In a statement, the watchdog added: “This exclusion is contrary to the Race Relations Act which the party is legally obliged to comply with. The Commission therefore thinks that the BNP may have acted, and be acting, illegally.”

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EUObserver: European institutions, especially the European Commission, should be given more power, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Friday (19 June), in a foretaste of his upcoming EU reform proposals.

“I am really for a strong European Commission, a strong Council [the institution representing EU member states] and a strong European Parliament,” Mr Sarkozy said at a press conference following a two-day meeting of EU leaders in Brussels.

“For the parliament, it’s done. For the council, I hope that with the Lisbon [treaty] it will be done. I really think we can have a win-win system for the three big institutions.“

According to the president, the European Commission at the moment is too weak, mainly due to its size – it has 27 commissioners, one from each member state and a large number of “smaller portfolios.”

The commission president “does not have enough authority over his commissioners,” Mr Sarkozy said

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The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор translation: death by starvation) refers to the famine of 1932–1933 in the Ukrainian SSR during which millions of people were starved to death because of the Soviet policies that forced farmers into collective farms. The Holodomor is considered one of the greatest national calamities to affect the Ukrainian nation in modern history. Millions of inhabitants of Ukraine (possibly 7000000 -10 000000) died of starvation in an unprecedented peacetime catastrophe.

KIEV, Ukraine (JTA) — A Jewish group in Ukraine is objecting to a criminal case brought over the “Great Famine” committed in the 1930s.

The nation’s security service is pressing the case against a list of former Soviet officials accused of committing the Holodomor, which caused the deaths of millions in Ukraine in 1932-33. Most of the names on the list were Jewish.

Ukrainian lawmaker Aleksandr Feldman, leader of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, said last week that it was “a farce” to press the case.

“All organizers of the Great Famine are dead,” he said.

Last July, the Ukrainian Security Service released a list of high-ranking Soviet state and Communist Party officials — as well as officials from NKVD, the police force of Soviet Russia — that essentially blamed Jews and Latvians responsible for perpetrating and executing the famine because most of the names on the list were Jewish.

The Ukrainian Jewish Committee called on the secret service to revise the list, which incited interethnic hatred, in order to clear up the “inaccuracy.”

Feldman believes there is a danger that the “Holodomor Affair” materials are being used for political purposes.

In late May, security service head Valentin Nalivaychenko claimed at a meeting with representatives of the World Congress of Ukrainians that “Ukraine has collected enough evidence to bring a criminal case regarding the famine, which was artificially created by the Bolshevik regime and caused mass death of citizens.”

Through the World Congress of Ukrainians, Nalivaychenko turned to leading foreign lawyers with a request to help find out the circumstances connected with preparing and committing the genocide.
JTA

Information about Holodomor in Ukrainian

Information about Holodomor in English

Telegraph: Students should be able to take brain boosting drugs like Ritalin to get better exam results, an expert has said.

John Harris, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester, said that it was “not rational to be against human enhancement” and that the drugs could help people become better educated.

“Smart drugs” are increasingly being used by students to improve their exam grades.

telegraph.co.uk

The Baltic Times : VILNIUS - The Seimas (Lithuanian parliament) has voted to pass the amended Law on the Protection of Minors against the Detrimental Effect of Public Information, which would see information about homosexuality banned from schools and other places that can be accessed by youths.

“The subject of homosexuality is not welcome in our schools,” a Seimas worker who asked to remain anonymous toldTBT after the June 16 vote.

A vote on June 11 saw a related law narrowly voted down. The law would have seen proponents of homosexuality fined or imprisoned for up to three years.

The law was strongly backed by the conservative ruling coalition, which favors a “traditional family model” that excludes people of different sexual orientation and single parent families, among others.

“The Seimas voted well. One aspect of propaganda of homosexuality for children is forbidden. It is also forbidden to discuss bad feelings about homosexuality – this is a good balance,” conservative coalition member Vilija Aleknaite-Abramikiene, who voted for the law, told TBT.

She said Lithuanians tolerated homosexuality, but didn’t want their children exposed to it in schools, adding that she also agrees with the ban against hate speech against homosexuals.

“We prefer a family model, the traditional family model, but of course if parents want to teach such propaganda they can, but according to our constitution, children are under protection,” she said.

Read more thebaltictimes.com