Menezes killers not charged?

Jean Charles de Menezes, Policing
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Or so The Sun alleges:

Menezes lying in the carriage after his murder

THE police officers who shot dead innocent suicide bomb suspect Jean Charles de Menezes at a Tube station last year will not face charges, according to a tabloid newspaper.

There is insufficient evidence of criminal offences in the shooting of the 27-year-old Brazilian at Stockwell Station, in south London, on July 22, according to a lawyer reviewing the case for the Crown Prosecution Service.

Mr De Menezes was shot in the head seven times by officers who mistook him for a suicide bomber in the wake of last July’s London bombings.

The lawyer quoted in The Sun said: “Mistakes were made but they do not amount to criminal misconduct.

“The firearms officers were acting under orders. Those in charge of surveillance believed he was a suspect.

“There is no realistic prospect that they will be prosecuted.”

In other news, it seems that Brian Paddick a Scotland Yard deputy assistant commissioner is being kicked off the force, for the crime of testifying against Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police commissioner:

Friends of Paddick said he had been offered the option of going on “gardening leave” for the next six months. This would last until November, when he has the option of retiring with a full police pension after 30 years’ service.

If agreed, the deal would mean Paddick spending half a year being paid £52,000 — half his estimated £104,000 annual salary — for doing nothing.

The Met has offered Paddick the alternative of taking a posting involving a “less visible position” that would mean him rarely visiting Scotland Yard. Colleagues say Paddick, who was on holiday last week, is now considering his options.

[…]

Earlier this year Paddick gave investigators from the Independent Police Complaints Commission a signed statement that appeared to contradict Blair’s account of the aftermath of the shooting.

Paddick testified that Moir Stewart, a key member of Blair’s private office, had been told just six hours after the shooting that police might have killed an innocent man.

Blair has maintained that the first he and his advisers knew of the error was 24 hours after the shooting.

It seems the coverup is in full effect. And it seems nobody is paying attention anymore, as I haven’t seen either story mention on the usual blogs. Will the Metropolitan Police really get away with another murder?

Five years of gay marriage: Amsterdam still no Sodom and Gomorrah

Amsterdam, LGBT
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picture from the World's first gay marriage

Well, not more so than usual. On this day exactly, five years ago, mayor Job Cohen performed the first true gay marriages in the world; not registered partnerships or church marriages unrecognised by the state, but real honest marriages. With that the last remaining significant legal barrier to full acceptance of homosexuality was removed and gay people could finally enjoy all the rights straight couples had enjoyed
for centuries.

All of this may not make much difference with everyday acceptance, but even from a purely practical point of view, let alone a symbolic one, it was a huge step forward. As a married couple you do enjoy priviledges single people, in a longterm relationship or not, do not, for example in tax and inheritance law. This was already available for gay people through the earlier civil partnership, but that didn;t carry the huge symbolic weight marriage still has. So said some of the gay couples interviewed in the Amsterdam weekly this week that being married helped a lot in the acceptance of their family, as that makes it easier for their family to see their relationship as real and serious.

It’s not a subject I daily think about, but I have to say I am quite proud of my country for being the first to recognise gay marriage, though I’d wish it had done so earlier. It’s about the last true gesture of tolerance, we’ve had here, before the Long Night of Fortuyn, Balkenende, van Gogh, Wilders and Verdonk started.

Negerzoen

Oh Those Crazy Cloggies, Racism
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negerzoen

We had another p.c. scandal here in the Netherlands last week, with hordes of defenders of common sense crawling out of the woodworks to defend the noble negerzoen. The negerzoen is an old-fashioned Dutch treat (though of Danish origins) and consists of a mixture of egg white and sugar, surrounded by a thin layer of mock-chocolate, all on top of an almost stale biscuit. The picture on the left shows a typical example.

The controversy was that the manufacturer of these negerzoenen finally came to the conclusion that the name of this chemical delight might be slightly on the racist side, a “negerzoen” literally translating as a “negrokiss”, which in combination of the look of the thing is slightly … suspect … This years or even decades after the product (dating from 1927) had been rebranded in other countries, but then us Dutch tend to hang on to our slightly racist (“but we don’t mean it that way, though!”) traditions…

Anyway, this sensible discussion evoked the inevitavble storm of pc angst, with all the usual assholes coming out to loudly declare the ridiculousness of the idea, drawing the usual flawed comparisons and in general acting as if the renaming of a not very nice snack most people stopped eating by the age of twelve means the total surrender of all traditional Dutch values. You know the type; if they were American they would’vde been doing stories on the war on Christmas… It’s all very tiresome and stupid. They know full well that it’s just not right, but are just trying it on for shock value and to show how freethinking they are, this herd of independent minds.