Family of 12 Ethiopian asylum seekers who have just landed in Britain get £1,460-a-week for vast London home
 

An Ethiopian family of 12 are being put up in a vast house costing the taxpayer almost £1,500-a-week just two months after arriving in Britain.

The couple and their 10 children are receiving a staggering £1,460-a-week housing benefit from the cash-strapped Tower Hamlets council in London - Britain's poorest borough.
 

The jobless family - who will also be receiving other handouts such as unemployment and child benefits - only arrived in London from Africa in the past few weeks.
 

It is yet another example of taxpayers having to pick up the bill for families to stay in vast houses in the capital.

Tower Hamlets in London is Britain's poorest borough

And it comes as it emerged benefits payouts in Tower Hamlets have cost the taxpayer a mammoth £223million in just one year.
 

The Ethiopians, who are believed to be asylum-seekers, will cost taxpayers £76,000 if they are allowed to stay in the property for 12 months.
 

They received a weekly sum of £1,462,90 on March 4, according to the council's housing benefits claims department.
 

Another nine families in the borough received between £590 and £613 in the same week and the last annual figures show 10 families getting between £20,600 and £38,300 for 2008-09.
 

 Basic White.

 Blue stripes

 That famous guy.

Is this a cartoon?

Basic Black

 How odd!

 Flowers?

 Board shorts

 Blue square shorts

 I'm in the Navy!

 Patriotic

 OMG!

Leaders consider value of crime news, access to black activists and other events

News directors for the city's three major local news networks are considering signing a joint agreement on coverage policies regarding Pittsburgh's black community as part of an effort to add positive messages to the news as an offset to crime coverage.

The idea was forwarded by WPXI-TV news director Mike Goldrick at the latest Black Political Empowerment Project summit on media portrayal of violence. More than 30 media and black leaders attended the summit Wednesday at the Channel 11 studios in Summer Hill to discuss -- and oftentimes vent -- about how the city's black community is covered by television, newspapers and radio.

"If the only information about black people is what's in the news, there's a reason why unemployment rate is astronomic and why we have all these negative issues -- because the imaging of black people is extremely negative," said BPEP president Tim Stevens. "Not only does it affect the viewpoint of white people with their thoughts on black people, I say it affects the psychology of black people."

Many attendees complained the main coverage of black Pittsburghers was at murder scenes or courthouses. "I'm tired of turning on the news and seeing a sister with her hair all over the place, five teeth missing and looking like she just stepped out of the bedroom. That's not something I want to see every time an African-American is interviewed on the news," one BPEP activist said.

News officials countered that they go wherever important crimes are, and don't choose coverage along race or neighborhood lines.

"We're not pursuing bad news. But look, if there's a shooting in Wexford we're going to go cover it. If there's a shooting in Homewood we're going to go cover a shooting in Homewood," said Alex Bongiorno, news director for WTAE-TV.

Self-righteousness is a dangerous vice. It breeds arrogance and moral blind spots for those who come to believe they are superior to those who share different worldviews.

Televangelists have fallen prey to this feeling of superiority, until the time they are caught crawling on the ground outside a hooker’s hotel room. Politicians have also wallowed in the grandiosity of their moralistic worldview, until they too fall prey to the hypocrisy that eventually snags all self-righteous moralizers.

For a decade now, we have been told of George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s moral failings. They have been regularly compared to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini and every other tyrant of the past century. Bush has been damned by the ministers of the far left as a war criminal, a fascist and a Nazi when labeling his policies as overly ideological and deeply flawed would have sufficed.

But that was never enough for the carnival barkers on cable news or the blogosphere. For the American left, Bush had to be condemned as an immoral beast who killed women and children to get his bloody hands on Iraqi oil.

That extremism required that the Bush years be filled with images of CODEPINK protesting on Capitol Hill, anti-war activists clogging the streets of New York City and left-wing commentators beating their chests with the self-righteous indignation of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.

But in the morally murky afterglow of the Obama years, the certainty of these secular saints has melted away.

President Barack Obama bowed to his generals’ demands by tripling troops in an unending war. CODEPINK did nothing.

Obama backed down on Guantanamo Bay. Anti-war protesters stayed at home.

Kay Hymowitz, who has been writing a lot of dazzling columns about gender these days, speculates about whether women’s newfound dominance in college graduation rates will lead to less marriages.

In a few weeks, the first of the 2011 college grads will toss their mortarboards in the air and bid adieu to campus life. A healthy majority of those hat-tossers – 57%, actually – will be women.

So here’s a question: when the time comes, will these women be willing to marry ‘down’? Don’t bet on it.

True, over the decades since women have been in the workforce, there has been a significant rise in the number of marriages where women bring home most of the bacon. As of 2007, 22% of wives were earning more than their husbands; that’s an impressive increase since 1970, when the number was only 4%. The percentage of couples where women have more schooling has also grown. Twenty-eight percent of wives have more education than their husbands; that is true of only 19% of husbands. The numbers were almost exactly the reverse in 1970, when 28% of husbands had more education, compared to 20% of wives.

…Remember, 22% of wives may be earning more than their husbands, but 78% are not.

It’s no secret that birth rates have been dropping across much of the Western world. The surprise isn’t that it’s happening; it’s that the birth rate hasn’t plunged so far that we’re not completely dying off.

NEW YORK — Apple Inc. is already the envy of the technology world. On Wednesday, it rubbed it in with quarterly results that had only one blemish: It couldn't make the new iPads fast enough.

"We sold every iPad 2 we could make," Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said. 

Apple sold 4.7 million iPads of both kinds in its latest quarter, below analyst expectations and the holiday quarter's sales. It launched the second version of the tablet computer two weeks before the end of the period. Prospective buyers likely held off for the new model, which then turned out to be tough to find. 

Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook told investors on a conference call that timing production lines to the transition from one model to the next is always difficult. He said the company has to make decisions "many, many weeks in advance." 

Now, he said, progress is being made on expanding iPad production. The company is expanding sales of the tablet to 13 more countries next week, bringing the total to 39. 

"I'm very confident that we can produce a very large number of iPads for the quarter," said Cook, who is known for deft management of supply chains and inventory. 

Apple launched the original iPad last April, and it's turned out to be the first really successful tablet computer. The company has sold 19.5 million iPads through the latest quarter. 

Analysts now see it encroaching significantly on PC sales. Competitors are rushing out their own tablets, but none have come close to matching the iPad's reception. 

Apple said net income for its fiscal second quarter, which ended March 26, was $5.99 billion, or $6.40 per share. That's up 95 percent from $3.07 billion, or $3.33 per share, a year ago. 

PALM BEACH, Fla. – With Passover week underway and Easter Sunday rapidly approaching, radio host Rush Limbaugh took issue with a comment from President Obama about the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Radio host takes aim at president's remark 'There's something about the Resurrection'

Rush Limbaugh posted this image of President Obama in bunny ears on his website today, a take-off on the movie, "There's Something About Mary."

As Obama led the annual Easter prayer breakfast in Washington yesterday, the president said, "I wanted to host this breakfast for a simple reason. Because, as busy as we are, as many tasks as pile up, during this season we are reminded that there's something about the Resurrection, something about the Resurrection of our Savior, Jesus Christ, that puts everything else in perspective."

"I'm speechless, really am speechless," Limbaugh said, as he jokingly referred to Obama as "the messiah." "It is the seminal moment of Christianity."

"It's risky whenever you start reacting to other people's expression of their religious beliefs. It's dangerous territory to wade into, but this still strikes me as strange phraseology."

The Michigan State Police have started using handheld machines called “extraction devices” to download personal information from motorists they pull over, even if they’re not suspected of any crime. Naturally, the ACLU has a problem with this.

The devices, sold by a company called Cellebrite, can download text messages, photos, video, and even GPS data from most brands of cell phones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to work with different models and can even bypass security passwords and access some information.

The problem as the ACLU sees it, is that accessing a citizen’s private phone information when there’s no probable cause creates a violation of the Constitution’s 4th Amendment, which protects us against unreasonable searches and seizures

April 20, 2011
Among the most preposterous claims being made on MSNBC about the fight over public sector unions in Wisconsin is that Gov. Scott Walker and the Republicans are losing "Reagan Democrats" by taking on government employees.

The theory seems to have been concocted by Howard Fineman, editor at The Huffington Post, who said, back in February on Lawrence O'Donnell's "The Last Word," that the "whole idea of a Reagan Democrat" was that union families were voting for Reagan. But today, according to Fineman, they are shifting against Republicans because of Walker's tough line on government unions. "That's got to scare Republican strategists nationally," he said.

Private sector unions are as similar to public sector unions as they are to gay civil unions.

But again on "Hardball," Fineman said that while Ronald Reagan appealed to union members, their "sons and daughters" were "having second thoughts."

This could be true -- but only if the sons and daughters of construction workers and miners, clinging to their guns and religion, and from  western pennsylvania grew up to be public school teachers, clinging to Earth Day and Kwanzaa.

About a month later, The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne was pitching the Reagan-Democrats-Come-Home canard as his own fresh insight in his column and on "The Ed Show," where he said that the Obama White House was no longer worried about losing the Midwest because "former Reagan Democrats" are saying, "This is not our politics."

Yes, who can ever forget the way government workers idolized Ronald Reagan?

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – There is evidence to refute the claim that President Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii, and therefore is not eligible to be president of the United States, but "birthers" persist with their claims that Obama is in office illegally. Donald Trump is the latest to question the president's birthplace.

Former state Health Director Chiyome Fukino has said several times she has personally inspected President Obama's birth certificate twice. In an interview earlier this month she said claims Obama was not born here are "ludicrous" and "silly."

Both the Honolulu Star Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser ran announcements in August, 1961 saying Mr. and Mrs. Barack Obama had a son on August 4 of that year.

But Trump and others continue to demand Obama make his birth certificate public.

"If he has a birth certificate he should release it," Trump told NBC News.

Trump exudes confidence. He is so sure of himself he says he may run for president in 2012.

"First of all, my successes, and I think you will attest to this, have been vast," he told NBC's Michael Isakoff. "I have built a great company. I've done a great job. I've put a lot of people to work," Trump added.

When Isakoff asked Trump if he thinks officials in Hawaii are lying about the birth certificate, Trump answered, "The governor of Hawaii said he was there when he was born. Now do you really believe that the governor of Hawaii was there when he was born? I don't."

Hawaii News Now caught up to Governor Neil Abercrombie and asked him to clarify what he meant when he said he was "there."

Hollywood Sex Pests

Man's worst friend: Dogs set to be banned in Iran as MPs brand them a 'blind imitation of Western culture'

By Michael Theodoulou
Last updated at 8:59 PM on 20th April 2011

A draft bill in the Iranian parliament that criminalises dog ownership is raising the hackles of thousands of pet lovers in the Islamic republic.

For years, those taking their pet for a walk have acted as furtively as if they were harbouring a fugitive.

But there was no specific law that that banned buying or selling dogs.

Criminal? An Iranian man walks his dog in Tochal north of Tehran, Iran

Now, for the first time, Iranian MPs have tabled a motion that criminalises owning dogs in private apartments or exercising them in public places.

The bill warns that in addition to posing health hazards, the growing popularity of dog ownership 'poses a cultural problem, a blind imitation of the vulgar Western culture'.

Saved from the pot: Hundreds of dogs rescued by animal activists in China as they are about to be killed for food
 

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 2:31 PM on 20th April 2011

Hundreds of dogs set for the slaughterhouse have been saved from the dinner plate by animal welfare activists in China.

The dogs were being transported behind cages on a truck when they were spotted - and an online call for help rescuing them was put out.

In a rare display of social action, the dogs were saved as they were taken from the Henan province to the Jilin province.