One thousand balloons were released on Tuesday by the Solidarity Youth Movement on top of a hill in the administrative capital of Pretoria "to symbolise the plea of head boys and girls from schools across the country to be exempted from affirmative action".
The chairperson of the youth wing of the largely white trade union, Solidarity, Ernst Roets, said in a statement that the balloons were released from a hill which overlooks Freedom Park -- which honours the liberation struggle. "At the moment freedom is out of our reach -- we can see it, but we cannot experience it. That is why we picked a hill overlooking Freedom Park rather than Freedom Park itself," said Roets.
The movement announced that it was planning a campaign in 2007 to demand that young people be exempt from affirmative action. The campaign will include music concerts, campus referendums and petitions to Parliament. The occasion was also used to release data obtained by a Markinor survey showing that 53% of people from all race groups between the ages of 18 and 23 felt that young people should be exempt from affirmative action.
"Exempting young people from affirmative action is not just the right thing to do, it is the democratic thing to do," Roets said. "We will not cease our campaign until we have achieved our objective. Matrics who finished their final school year in 2006 completed their entire education during the post-1994 era. They should not be disadvantaged on the grounds of affirmative action. This is a generation free from the apartheid past. By imposing affirmative action on them on the grounds of the so-called wrongs of the past violates their human dignity, since they are being accused of something in which they played no part," Roets said.
"The response of head boys and head girls was amazing."
He reported that about 95% of the respondents supported the call for exemption from affirmative action. "These young people are not only angry about being discriminated against -- they are embittered," he said.
"Cinnamon hotline, guten Tag. How can I help you?" Amid a health scare over traditional cinnamon cookies, Germans are racing to get the facts on the sugar and spice they consume by the truckload at Christmastime.
The culprit is coumarin, a toxic chemical compound smelling of newly mown hay that naturally occurs in cinnamon grown in China -- a key ingredient in the star-shaped biscuits and other sweets that are wildly popular here during the holiday season.
The hotline was recently set up by the German Confectionery Industry Association (BDSI) after Germany's federal states issued an official warning about coumarin on the basis of a study by an independent health watchdog. It warned that children weighing less than 15kg should not eat more than one spice cake or four of the glazed cinnamon cookies known as "Zimtsterne" that are omnipresent each December. Adults with a sweet tooth can safely eat up to 16 biscuits daily.
Fearing a crippling blow to the industry at the most lucrative time of the year, the BDSI has staffed the hotline with pleasant operators who advise callers to enjoy spice cookies and cinnamon-rich mulled wine "in moderation".
Coumarin has been banned as a food additive in several countries for decades because it can have a toxic effect on the kidneys and liver. Some consumer groups have charged that it is potentially carcinogenic. It is found in relatively high doses in cinnamon from China, one of two kinds most commonly sold on the world market. The Chinese variety is frequently used in store-bought baked goods.
European Union regulations set the upper limit at two milligrams of coumarin per kilogram for food products. But almost half of cookies, cereals and rice puddings sold in Germany surpass this amount, said Barbara Hohl, of the independent consumer protection group Foodwatch.
Foodwatch tested 28 products, including 11 cookie brands, and found coumarin levels that were up to 20 times the European legal limit. "This is a violation of the law. These products should be pulled from the market. But because of pressure from the industry, all we have are recommendations to consumers," Hohl said.
Foodwatch has launched legal action against a well-known cookie manufacturer, a supermarket chain and the federal ministry of consumer protection. However, the industry lobby argues that the European regulations are far too strict and that consumption of up to 67 milligrams per kilogram of food (about 30 times the legal limit) poses no health threat. "Cinnamon and products containing it are only dangerous if consumed over a long period of time and in great quantities by people of fragile health," the BDSI said in a statement.
Nevertheless, leading cookie goods manufacturer Bahlsen recently announced that it had decided to changes its recipes to reduce the amount of coumarin in its products.
Die Deutsche have been eating these cookies for how many centuries years? And how many people exactly have gotten sick or died from the lovely "toxic chemical compound"?
Give it a rest, Dummköpfe.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
12/23/2006 13:15 Comments ||
Top||
#4
Coumarin is also known to many heart patients as a precursor drug to anti-coagulants, such as warfarin. "Coumarin clinics" have big lobbies, as most people who get a pacemaker implant have to take coumarin.
#2
Regardless of any disputes about the validity of terrorism, Islam's policy of Abject Gender Apartheid by itself is enough to totally discredit it as a worthwhile creed. Reversing this vile mistreatment of women is just one of many reformation awaiting Islam and one so unlikely to occur that a Muslim holocaust is made only more probable. Islam is a threat to all liberty and freedom in so many different ways that it cannot be tolerated by open societies.
I almost puke when I see a garbed hag defend Islam. I even heard one praise her own genital mutiliation, because it focused her life on non-sexual things.
Least favorite Tabari quote on the other sex:
Tabari IX:113 Allah permits you to shut them in separate rooms and to beat them, but not severely. If they abstain, they have the right to food and clothing. Treat women well for they are like domestic animals and they possess nothing themselves. Allah has made the enjoyment of their bodies lawful in his Quran.
#4
As so pertinently and pointedly asked by .com a while back;
What is Islam's saving grace?
It stands as the perfect touchstone question to pose anyone who argues in Islam's favor. WTF is it? Citing how Islam serves the spiritual needs of Muslims is a load of horseshit when one considers how it twists the mind and perverts the spirit.
That Islam itself remains willfully blind to its own shortcomings is perhaps most revealing of all. Islam is that most dangerous type of fool; One who does not know and does not know that he does not know. (To quote an ancient Arabic saying.)
Such purblind conduct in the midst of so much confrontation indicates a steely resolve to avoid all autoscopic thought, introspection or self-evaluation whatsoever. This in turn so greatly reduces any hope of Islamic reformation that such a notion rightly should be dismissed as not even being possible.
This is one principal reason that I have lost all hope of anything but an intensely violent conflict with Islam in general. To hope against it has begun to take on an air of irrationality and illogic whereby peaceful solutions no longer have any place at the table. Islam would be pursuing them if they did exist and such is most definitely not the case.
Islam is essentially incorrigible and unrepentant. A bad combination for one who does not hold the whip hand on high. Such implacability when confronting a Western enemy with massive nuclear arsenals is nothing short of suicidal. The time rapidly approaches for us to grant this death cult their deepest wish.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
