School Muslim headscarf ban, only if education under threat (Netherlands)

Religious schools in the Netherlands may not ban Muslim pupils from wearing headscarves simply if it contradicts their core values, the cabinet said on Tuesday in answer to questions from the anti-Islam PVV.

‘The freedom of education refers primarily to the process of giving education. Special schools can place demands on the participation in that education, if this is necessary to realise their core values,’ home affairs minister Piet Hein Donner and education minister Marja van Bijsterveldt said in a statement.

In addition, the argument that the wearing of headscarves shows a lack of equality between men and women gets equally short-shrift from the ministers. ‘Fashion dictates all sorts of differences between the way men and woman dress,’ the ministers said.

Meanwhile, a Muslim girl at the centre of a row over her headscarf at a Catholic school in Volendam has agreed to cover her head in the assembly hall and in school corridors only, the Telegraaf reports.

Dutch News

Auschwitz sign stealer transferred to Sweden

Anders Hogstrom, top right

A Swedish neo-Nazi leader who organized the theft of the "Arbeit Macht Frei” sign from Auschwitz was transferred to Sweden to serve his three-year prison sentence.

Anders Hogstrom was handed over to Swedish officials on Monday at Krakow Airport, according to reports.

A Polish court last December sentenced Hogstrom, who acted as a middleman between a neo-Nazi buyer and five Polish thieves, to 32 months in prison as part of a plea bargain. Hogstrom faced up to 10 years in prison.

The iron sign, which measures 16 feet across and means "Work makes you free," was stolen from the former Nazi concentration camp on Dec. 18, 2009 and recovered elsewhere in the country 72 hours later. It was found cut into three pieces.

Hogstrom, who was arrested in February 2010 in Stockholm and extradited to Poland in April, founded the National Socialist Front, a Swedish neo-Nazi movement, in 1994.

JTA

Man sacked for slurs on Facebook (Australia)

A Gold Coast man has lost his job after his employer confronted him about derogatory comments he published on Facebook.

Jason Dowling, who worked on the Hinze Dam Project managed by Thiess Pty Ltd, has been stood down after admitting to posting offensive remarks following a tip-off by a member of the public.

A 25-year-old law student from Lismore who only wanted to be identified as Caroline told ninemsn she emailed Thiess on January 30 with a link to Mr Dowling's Facebook page.

Four days later she received a response from Thiess group HR manager Mark Vining saying Mr Dowling's employment at the company had been terminated following an investigation.

In addition, a second unidentified employee was also fired and a third tendered his resignation.

"Those comments are in no way supported by our business practices, are in breach of various Company and Project policies, and certainly not encouraged or endorsed by the management of Thiess," Mr Vining wrote in that letter.

"Thiess has a long and proud history of promoting diversity and equality in our workforce, and have many programmes in place to support these objectives."

Caroline told ninemsn she first saw screen shots of Mr Dowling's comments posted on the website PWSNT.com and "out of curiosity" looked him up on Facebook.

She said she found "really vile racist slurs" on his wall, which were publically viewable by anyone because of his low privacy settings.

"He mentioned his workplace a couple of times and he made homophobic comments about some workmates," Caroline said.

He made hateful remarks directed at Aboriginal people, Muslims, refugees and women.

Caroline told ninemsn she had doubts about letting his employer know but felt it was the right thing to do.

"I didn't contact his workplace immediately but it was racial vilification and I thought his workplace really should know [because] I'm sure his attitude would've affected people in his workplace."

Although Mr Dowling's Facebook page is now private, some of the censored screen shots and correspondences have been posted on The Anti-Bogan's 'Wall of Shame', a blog that aims to document racism in Australia.

An anonymous blogger from The Anti-Bogan told ninemsn that both Mr Dowling and his girlfriend have been in contact with them, confirming the authenticity of the story.

Mr Dowling told The Anti-Bogan he had lost his job and "around $12,000 in incentive bonuses and entitlements".

Mr Dowling said the jokes made were intended for his friends only and not "for people to go looking for things that offend them".

The Anti-Bogan blogger has defended the site, saying the majority of content published is taken from public forums and walls.

"We're just republishing what people have published publicly, exposing, highlighting and immortalising it. That's why we're different from WikiLeaks."

"If anyone ever says racism isn't alive in Australia, we say here is documented evidence. We have lots of files and have even exposed two people from the Australian Defence Force," he said.

Thiess representatives chose not to comment when contacted about this article.

Mr Dowling has not responded to ninemsn's requests for comment.

9News

Rapes, Hate Crimes Rising in Moscow (Russia)

The crime rate in Moscow decreased year on year in 2010, but figures for both rapes and hate crimes grew, and the average size of a bribe extorted by officials in the capital was 20 times larger than nationwide, the Investigative Committee said Tuesday.

An average bribe in the city amounts to 600,000 rubles ($20,000), compared with 30,000 rubles elsewhere in Russia, Vadim Yakovenko, senior investigator at the committee’s Moscow branch, said at a news conference, Interfax reported.

The statistics are based on crimes investigated by the committee, he said. More than 500 graft cases have been forwarded to courts in 2010, Yakovenko said. The total number of crimes in Moscow dropped 12 percent to some 186,000, he said. Some 12,000 of them were committed by non-Muscovites, he added.

The figure for murders decreased 8 percent to 582, the investigator said.

The situation was worse with extremism-related crimes, the number of which grew one-third over the year, reaching 105. The number of extremism-motivated murders increased 50 percent, Yakovenko said.

There were also 382 rapes registered last year, Yakovenko said, the RAPSI judicial news agency reported. That figure is 38 percent higher than last year, he said.

Official statistics were called into question in an extensive study by a research group at the General Prosecutor’s Office Academy last month.

The 840-page study claimed that only about one in 10 crimes nationwide was registered, the crime rate was growing at 2.4 percent over the last decade, and officials failed to take into account 126,000 possible murders in 2009 alone.

Moscow Times