Journalists launch campaign to challenge BNP in run-up to election

Campaigning journalists and media workers are to launch EXPOSE, a campaign aimed at "revealing the undemocratic and racist nature" of the British National Party.The new campaign will tackle the BNP's "attempts to construct a respectable public image" and support media workers who refuse to work on uncritical programmes or material, the group announced today.

EXPOSE aims to brief reporters and news editors to help them challenge the BNP's statements and spokespersons in the run-up to the UK election, the campaigners said.

A launch rally at the Amnesty UK headquarters in London on 23 February will feature Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, columnist and broadcaster; Mehdi Hasan, political senior editor for the New Statesman; Sunny Hundal, editor of the Liberal Conspiracy blog; and Peter Hain, secretary of state for Wales.

"The political and media consensus appears to be that the way to tackle the BNP is to meet it halfway, by talking up tough anti-immigration measures (...) this conventional wisdom must urgently be challenged," said one its founding supporters, James Macintyre, political correspondent for the New Statesman.

"The BNP is not an 'ordinary' political party (...) So why does the media, including the BBC, give them so much time, space and opportunity to spread their bile?" added his New Statesman colleague Mehdi Hasan.

The campaign is also backed by the unions, with speakers at the launch event including Michelle Stanistreet, deputy general secretary of the National Union of Journalists; Pat Styles, national official for BECTU, the media and entertainment union, and Weyman Bennett of joint secretary, Unite Against Fascism.

"Journalists have a duty to hold up to the closest scrutiny the claims and activities of those who would foment racial tension and violence. The BNP's inflammatory rhetoric about immigration cannot be taken at face value," said Stanistreet.
journalism.co.uk

Russian Court Reduces Sentences For Skinhead Group Leaders

Russia's Supreme Court today reduced the prison sentences of the leaders of a group of 10 skinheads jailed in September for ethnically motivated attacks, RFE/RL's Russian Service reports.

The court ruled to cut by one year the sentences of skinhead leaders Ilya Shutko, 19, and Yevgenia Zhikhareva, 18, to nine and seven years in prison, respectively. All the members had originally received sentences of three to 10 years in jail.

The court said the criminal liability on a number of charges against the two had expired.

The Prosecutor-General's Office said previously that all the crimes -- which were committed against non-Slavic people -- were done on the grounds of ethnic hatred and aimed to incite national or religious enmity.
On February 1, 2008, Kyrgyz citizen Altynbek Ashirov was beaten by five of the skinheads and stabbed to death by Shutko. In February and March 2008, the group of skinheads made three murder attempts in Moscow against Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Chinese citizens.
rferl.org

Online safety push for five-year-olds (UK)

Children as young as five are being targeted in a new online safety campaign by the UK body charged with protecting children from abuse.

The campaign uses cartoons to show five to seven-year-olds that people are not always what they seem.

It is thought 80% of children in this age group use the web and one-in-five parents of this age group worry about who their children contact online.

The campaign is being launched as part of EU Internet Safety Day.
The organisation behind the safety campaign - the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) - is one of the many which have been behind campaigns designed to help children and teenagers to keep themselves safe from online predators.
The organisation believes that by raising awareness of online risks at an early age, children will be better protected as they grow up.
When it was set up nearly four years ago, it began by running campaigns in secondary schools for teenagers and has gradually targeted younger and younger groups.

'Unnecessary risk'
Head of Ceop, Jim Gamble, said: "Unfortunately, some of the victims we see here are very young.
"People will try to find out where they are, where they go to school. Children can expose themselves to unnecessary risk.
"We do see children who are younger and younger being exposed to risk - and the risk is not always clear. There are a number of subtle messages.

"Unbelievably some of these children have access to webcams, but that's the world we live in."
Ceop says every week, among the 500 cases being reported through its "Report abuse" button found on some websites, there will be four from children at immediate risk of harm.
Anecdotal evidence suggests very young children are getting onto social networking sites aimed at teenagers and adults - where they are very vulnerable to online predators.
Jo Bryce, from the Cyber Research Centre at the University of Central Lancashire, said: "I have been into schools to give talks on e-safety and teachers have told me that six and seven-olds there are on social networking sites."
Among publicised cases of abuse of children who have been targeted individually online, however, she says, the victims have tended to be older - aged 10 and up.
Young teenage girls were most at risk.
Dr Bryce said educating children at a young age was the best approach to take.
"The focus on e-safety education for children aged five-plus is absolutely the right thing to do. Then you can build up the information over time so they can keep themselves safe," she said.
Still traumatised
One teenager has spoken to BBC News about how she was targeted online by a paedophile when she was 12.
He began messaging her after being introduced as a "friend of a friend".
Once he had won her trust, he asked her to pose in front of the family webcam and took images of her.

The man has since been tracked down and jailed for seven years. Ceop says he had targeted 30 other children.
Still clearly traumatised by what happened, the girl, who is now 17, had this advice for other young people: "When I was doing it, I didn't feel wrong. I didn't have the little feeling in my stomach. I'd just tell people 'be careful who you talk to'.
"Don't try and make friends over the internet because you never know who they really are."
'Just horrible'
She said such people would try to win you over in whichever way they could.
"They're not going to be horrible. They're not going to force you to do things. They are going to want you to stay on their good side.
"They are going to be nice to you, they're going to be really nice. You are going to think they are the nicest people in the world and deep down inside they're just horrible."
Child psychologist David Coleman says the cartoon being used by Ceop in its education programme will introduce young children to ideas which will enable them to explore online environments safely.
"Understanding what constitutes 'private' information - and recognising that people can pretend to be different online - are critical to developing safe behaviour online, which greatly reduces their vulnerability to abuse," he said.
Research from Ofcom published last autumn suggested that 80% of five to seven-year-olds use the internet and that among nine to 11-year olds, 94% do so.
At home, more than two-thirds (67%) of five to seven-year-olds were using the internet in 2009 - up from 57% in 2008.
More than a quarter of parents were concerned about the content of the website that their five to seven-year-olds visited
here's a BBC video about the whole thing



BBC

Daughter of a hero (USA)

Daughter of a hero

By Brandon Santiago on the Hanford Sentinel website

The painful images coming out of Haiti depicting the earthquake devastation add to the lineage of horrific events that have occurred in mankind's history.
The events in Haiti may have been caused by a natural disaster, but all tragic moments in time share a common trait: Human suffering.
Anne-Marie Kessler of Riverdale says she knows this all too well. She grew up in France during the Nazi occupation in World War"I can tell you that war is hell," Kessler said. "My father was gone most of the time; we resented him for it, it was difficult for our mother. We always felt he cared more for strangers than us. It was later we realized the strangers needed him more than we did. Many more would have died if he hadn't helped them."

Kessler, 79, sits in the dining room of her home, sifting through old photographs of her family. Next to the affidavit issued to her mother and father by the Gestapo for their arrest, lies a book with her father's face on the cover.
The book is "A Rescuer's Story: Pastor Pierre-Charles Toureille in Vichy France" by Tela Zasloff. It's the story of Kessler's father, a French Protestant pastor whose efforts resulted in the rescue of hundreds of refugees, most of them Jewish.
Inspired by his Huguenot heritage, Toureille participated in international Protestant church efforts to combat Nazism during the 1930s and headed a major refugee aid organization in Vichy France during World War II. After the war, he was honored by the Jewish organization Yad Vashem as one of the "Righteous Among the Nations."
Kessler said her father was one of many heading a large network of people striving to stop the rise of the Nazi regime. The network established a specialized school and home in Czechoslovakia called The Home for Christian Children.
"The Christian element of it was a front, to ward off Nazis," Kessler said. "In actuality most children who lived there were freed or escaped Jewish children from concentration camps."
Kessler is the fourth of five children in the Toureille family. The author of "A Rescuer's Story," Zasloff, got in touch with Kessler and her brother, Marc Toureille, to get their personal perspectives of their father's work.
Along with interviews with other members of the underground network, the book was compiled and published in 2003.
Marc Toureille details his memory of when the Nazis invaded France in the book.
"We turned off the lights and rushed to the windows, half hiding behind slotted blinds," Toureille said. "They had come, boots hitting the pavement, the shame, the anger, the hate ... I wanted to see them all killed."
Kessler herself remembers living with the Jewish children at the home when she was 10 years old. One day she and the children went on a field trip to a nearby river with a male teacher and chaperone who worked with her father. When they reached the river, the chaperone threw Kessler into the river with all her clothes on and told her to get out on her own.
"That was my first survival lesson; he wanted me to be tough like the Jewish children, [to] learn to endure," she said, looking at the chaperone's photo. "He had me walk barefoot through rocks to toughen my feet, because we never knew when the Germans would come; I loved that man, he was my favorite teacher."
Kessler said that in 1943, her father called her into his office one day and said he had some bad news for her.
The Germans had gunned her favorite teacher down. He was on the run in Czechslovakia, then went to Belgium, and ended up at this house in France.
"He had a little boy he never knew and he was trying to get home to him, and the Nazis found him and killed him," she said through tears.
Meanwhile her older brother, Simon, was in college, but it had been awhile since they had heard from him. Then, one day a stranger stopped her mother in the street and said "I know where your son is."
"She told my mother, 'Come to my home, tonight after dark, and make sure you're alone and I will tell you where he is," Kessler said.
The woman provided her address and her mother ventured out that night, making sure no one knew or saw when she left. She discovered her brother was fighting for the French in the underground against the Germans. The woman told her mother "My son is with your son; they're friends in underground, fighting together," Kessler said.
"I don't like when people say the French never did anything or cared, or were not thankful [for American help during the war]," Kessler said. "... because I know, I was there, and I'll be thankful until the day I die."