Magic Statistics

A dogfight shaping up at the highest levels of the Turkish government could shake the entire country.

The state prosecutor has applied to the Constitutional Court to ban the ruling party as a religious party intent on introducing Islamic customs and law, contrary to the nation's secularist foundation.  The ban would include the party leader and democratically elected prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

With Turkey's Constitutional Court due to rule on whether to ban the ruling Islamist-rooted Justice and Development (AK) party, the country's political fault lines are growing deeper.

They pit the AK against Turkey's decades-old secular establishment, which includes the military and parts of the judiciary. Each side accuses the other of operating a "deep state," or shadow government activities. The secularists accuse the AK party of quietly seeking to overhaul Turkey's secular order, while the ruling party says the secular establishment will do anything to maintain that order — even a coup d'etat or murder.

The crisis deepened when a dozen people accused of being members of the establishment's "deep state" were arrested on March 21, including 83-year-old Ilhan Selcuk, a well-known secularist journalist of the "Cumhuriyet" newspaper and a fierce government opponent, as well as Kemal Alemdaroglu, a former president of Istanbul University.

The arrests are widely seen as the AK party’s response to the crisis, but officials maintain they are unrelated.

The court will decide “soon” whether to consider the prosecutor’s argument.

Some business leaders and other observers fear that an all-out fight between the ruling party and its secularist adversaries could prompt a military coup.

Previous related posts:

• Murder trial in Turkey delayed by mysterious clerical error
• Trial for “insulting Turkishness” drags on
• Turkish police knew of plan to kill Hrant Dink, but did nothing

Diamond Hoo Ha, the new CD by Supergrass, was released on Monday, and it is amazingly great.  The former wunderkind of Britpop are all over 30 now, and the music is better than ever, IMHO.  Infectious and compelling, it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.

This performance of “Rebel In You” was recorded on Later with Jools Holland, 29 February.

The album is available now in all good shops, including iTunes Music Store, and a few rubbish ones as well.

The band’s official website is here, while another official site run by band members is here.

Prince Edward Island residents are being encouraged to use compact fluorescent light bulbs because they’re supposed to be good for the environment.  The government’s hazardous materials experts, however, are advising users to be extremely careful in the event of breakage because they contain the highly toxic metal mercury.

"The first thing you should do is clear the area of children or pets. Perhaps open a window nearby to ventilate the area," [Glenda] MacKinnon-Peters said.

The provincial Environment Department website goes into further details of how mercury should be handled, including the use of safety goggles and gloves if possible. Any carpet affected by a spill should be cut out and disposed of. Finally, the waste should be sealed in a jar or plastic bag before taking it to a hazardous waste depot.

OK, so you manage to get the broken bulb to the hazardous waste depot without poisoning yourself or your kids.  How are the geniuses at the depot going to handle the toxic mess?  Like any other bit of rubbish, apparently.

Despite the precautions suggested by the Environment Department, the Island Waste Management Corp. — the Crown corporation in charge of waste on P.E.I. — has no special disposal plans for broken bulbs. Its current policy is simply for them to go into the waste stream, but it treats burned-out bulbs as hazardous waste.

Spent bulbs are hazardous material, but broken bulbs are treated the same as worn-out shoes.  That is brilliant.

Is political correctness helping to keep teenage sex slaves in captivity?

A Muslim leader in Britain has charged that police are not coming against gangs of Asian pimps who force white girls into prostitution because they fear being accused of racism.

Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Rochdale-based Ramadhan Foundation, has claimed officers are differentiating between criminals on the basis of race. He says fears of a repeat of the Oldham race riots mean officers are `overtly sensitive' and are not clamping down on prostitution.

His comments are to be aired this week on a BBC programme which will reignite the controversial issue.

The broadcast comes after a 2004 Channel 4 documentary which claimed Asian men in Bradford were grooming under-age white girls for prostitution was cancelled.

Police claimed it could provoke racial violence during the local election campaign. But on Panorama tomorrow Mr Shafiq claims the police are `over cautious' when dealing with the issue.

"They fear being called racist," he says. "They are not Asian criminals, they are not Muslim criminals, they are not white criminals. They are criminals and should be treated as criminals."

The scheduled 2004 documentary was pulled after police claimed it could provoke racial violence.  Apparently, police are still more concerned with keeping the “peace” instead of gathering evidence against brutal thugs.

Organised criminal gangs have forced an estimated 5000 British girls, some as young as 13, into sex slavery.

Tonight, an eight-month investigation by the BBC's flagship current affairs programme Panorama reveals evidence of a growing number of young girls being sexually abused and brutalised, pimped by gangs of criminals and recruited to a life of degradation and shame while barely into their teens.

All are left irrevocably damaged by what they endure, while in certain quarters the police stand accused of failing to protect them from the sexual predators who stalk Britain's regional centres.

As Aravinda Kosaraju, a researcher at the campaigning organisation Crop (Coalition for the Removal of Pimping), puts it: "The abuse these girls suffer is horrendous. What we're dealing with is gross criminality, and that should be confronted irrespective of the race of the perpetrators.

Manchester police dismiss the allegations as “nonsense based on ignorance”.

Last September, it emerged that a successful investigation and prosecution of two “Asian” (i.e., Pakistani) pimps was driven, not by police, but mothers of abducted girls.

Previous related posts:

• Anti-drug operation stopped by racism allegation
• British police afraid to bust Asian pimps

Quite the opposite, in fact.  According to myth-busting research, people who don’t wear glasses are more likely to be geeky.  I am so glad to hear that.

Latest Australian research into myopia or shortsightedness reveals that people who wear glasses are not stereotypical geeks or nerds.

"We have literally busted the myth that people who wear glasses are introverted or have particular personality characteristics. They are more likely to be agreeable and open, rather than closed and introverted," said A/Prof Paul Baird of the University of Melbourne's Centre for Eye Research Australia.

Well, I am kind of introverted, so maybe I am a stereotypical glasses-wearing geek.  Or nerd.

Previous related posts:

• It’s true: Computer geeks are socially backward
• Nerd, and proud of it!

Margaret Somerville of McGill University drops a bombshell in an e-mail to Suzanne Fortin and posted at Suzanne’s Big Blue Wave blog.

The case in question involved a married couple - man and woman - who had conceived naturally, the woman was 34 weeks pregnant and the scan showed the baby had a cleft palate. They requested an abortion, because they did not want to have a "defective baby".

In another case, a 29 year old graduate student from [OMITTED] was 32 weeks pregnant and wanted an abortion for social reasons. I was consulted on the case and later followed up to see what happened. The answer I received was that "You don't want to know", said in such a way it was clear an abortion had been undertaken.
. . .
There is an abortion clinic on Saint Catherine Street in Montreal that, as I understand the situation, does all the very late term (over 22 weeks gestation) abortions in Quebec. It's been reported that the Quebec Government has sent at least one obstetrician to the US to be trained to do these abortions - if they were not happening, why have a clinic and why train someone to do them? And I also understand that late abortions up to 22 weeks (i.e. past the CMA's cut-off for viability of 20 weeks) are usually done at a University of Sherbrooke hospital in Sherbrooke.

Suzanne omitted information that could potentially help identify a woman who had an abortion.

Here’s another bombshell—or, at least, it’s a bombshell to this statistician.  Statistics Canada publishes a comprehensive set of abortion statistics every year, but why is gestational age not included?

[S]ome years ago, instructions were given to Statistics Canada not to request from hospitals and clinics reporting, as required, on the number of abortions, the gestational age at which abortion occurred. My understanding is that this was a politically motivated instruction.

I have two questions: Who gave that instruction, and why did Statistics Canada go along?

Read the whole thing.

Margaret Somerville, one of Canada’s foremost legal and moral philosophers, holds multiple academic posts at McGill: Professor, Faculty of Medicine; Founding Director, McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law; and Samuel Gale Professor of Law.

Previous related posts:

• Abortions can lead to mental illness: Royal College of Psychiatrists
• “The Triumph of the Will”
• Most Canadians oppose unrestricted abortion
• Abortion in the UK: Safe, legal, and common