A woman who was turned away from a gay bar has filed a human rights complaint.

Audrey Vachon was recently refused service at Le Stud in Montreal’s gay village after sitting down with her father for a quiet afternoon pint. A waiter came over and told her father, Gilles, that the bar doesn’t serve women.

Vachon said she would be the first to complain if homosexuals were refused service at a business.

Bar owner Michel Gadoury says Le Stud has banned women most nights since it was established 11 years ago. He says he doesn’t understand the fuss.

On many nights it shows gay pornography on TV screens instead of the usual hockey game fare.

Read More

A haul of 28 new planets beyond our solar system has been detected by the world’s most prolific planet hunters.

The finds were among 37 objects seen orbiting distant stars by a US and Anglo-Australian team in the last year.

Other objects reported by the group, at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu, included five failed stars, known as brown dwarfs.

Read More

Up to 30,000 asylum seekers will be allowed to stay in the Netherlands after the Dutch government announced an amnesty.

The pardon will apply to those who sought asylum in the Netherlands before April 2001, many of whom have been in the country for years appealing against expulsion.

An estimated 25,000 to 30,000 people who arrived in the country before immigration laws were tightened will qualify, junior justice and labour minister Nebat Albayrak told a press conference.

Read More

All four men charged in the gang rape and beating of a 21-year-old Fremont woman at a Half Moon Bay beach in 2005 participated in the brutal attack, a San Mateo County prosecutor told jurors on Monday.

DNA evidence links Edgar Cardelas, 20, Anastasio Flores, 20, Celestino Guillermo, 23, and Gerardo Resendiz, 18, to the repeated rape of a woman they drove, against her wishes, to a beach at Miramontes Point early in the morning of May 29, 2005, Deputy District Attorney Greg Devitt told jurors during opening statements in the trial, which continued on Tuesday.

Read More

Police have arrested four Middle-East students of a private college in Subang Jaya for allegedly gang-raping a fellow student at a house in Sungai Way last week.

Petaling Jaya OCPD ACP Mazlan Mansur said today that a police team was despatched to the house after the 20-year-old woman lodged a report last Monday.

The suspects, in their 20s, were remanded for a week to facilitate investigations.

The woman claimed that she was lured to the house rented by the foreigners where they took turns to rape her between last Sunday and Monday.

Read More

A gay pub in the city of Melbourne has won the right to ban heterosexuals – the first time such a decision has been made in Australia.

The Victorian state civil and administrative tribunal ruled the Peel Hotel could ban patrons based on their sexual orientation.

The pub’s management said the move would stop groups of heterosexual men and women abusing gay people.

Civil liberties groups have supported the decision.

Read More

Spanish police have arrested 14 suspected Islamist militants, mostly in the north-eastern region of Catalonia.

The suspects were allegedly involved in recruiting jihadi volunteers for training in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The interior ministry believes the majority of those arrested are Moroccan nationals. Police have confiscated a considerable amount of computer data.

Read More

Perhaps you’ve heard the claims: Were it not for the genius and energy of African-American inventors, we might find ourselves in a world without traffic lights, peanut butter, blood banks, light bulb filaments, and a vast number of other things we now take for granted but could hardly imagine life without.

Such beliefs usually originate in books or articles about black history. Since many of the authors have little interest in the history of technology outside of advertising black contributions to it, their stories tend to be fraught with misunderstandings, wishful thinking, or fanciful embellishments with no historical basis. The lack of historical perspective leads to extravagant overestimations of originality and importance: sometimes a slightly modified version of a pre-existing piece of technology is mistaken for the first invention of its type; sometimes a patent or innovation with little or no lasting value is portrayed as a major advance, even if there’s no real evidence it was ever used.

Unfortunately, some of the errors and exaggerations have acquired an illusion of credibility by repetition in mainstream outlets, especially during Black History Month (see examples for the traffic light and ironing board). When myths go unchallenged for too long, they begin to eclipse the truth. Thus I decided to put some records straight. Although this page does not cover every dubious invention claim floating around out there, it should at least serve as a warning never to take any such claim for granted.

Each item below is listed with its supposed black originator beneath it along with the year it was supposedly invented, followed by something about the real origin of the invention or at least an earlier instance of it.

http://www33.brinkster.com/iiiii/inventions

[Is this the first step to forced bussing? Can anyone see white parents choosing to send their kids to all black inner city schools? Or can we see black parents sending their children to white flight schools in the countryside?-ed]

Some schools would be able to select pupils by race in order to improve community relations under plans being considered by the Conservative Party.

Shadow education secretary David Willetts said city academies could use racial selection to unite communities divided by race or religion.

Government figures in the Observer show some schools in England have a pupil majority from one ethnic group.

Read More

Switzerland’s reputation as a haven of tolerance for immigrants has been undermined in recent weeks by calls for a ban on new minarets, a mysterious synagogue blaze and neo-Nazi threats to disrupt national day celebrations.

Switzerland is known for public order and efficiency. Its neutral status and high living standards, as well as its need for lower cost workers, have historically attracted refugees from conflicts around Europe and the world.

But with rising immigration — and lack of integration caused partly by tight laws on handing out Swiss passports — religious and ethnic tension has been on the rise, particularly focusing on Muslims.

By the end of 2005, more than a fifth of Switzerland’s 7.5 million residents were foreigners, a higher proportion than in any other European country except Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, according to the Federal Statistics Office.

Read More