Ed Sheeran is perfect.
R. Kelly joined Phoenix at Coachella to play Ignition (Remix) mashed up with a bit of 1901
At least 28 immigrants shot at Greece strawberry plantation after not being paid for six months
April 19, 2013Greek police are hunting three strawberry plantation foremen, who are suspected of shooting nearly 30 workers, mostly Bangladeshi, after immigrants demanded wages they had not been paid for six months.
Officials have promised “swift and exemplary” punishment for the three foremen who disappeared after the incident that took place on April, 17 in Nea Manolada, about 260km (160 miles) west of Athens.
So far police arrested the owner of the farm, in the rural south of the country and a local man on suspicion of hiding the three foremen.
The violence allegedly occurred when one of the supervisors opened fire on a crowd of about 200 foreign workers gathered to request their unpaid salaries.
According to one of the immigrants, they were promised wages of 22 euros ($28.70) a day.
“They keep telling us that we will get paid in a month, and this has been going on for more than a year,” Reuters quoted a man who refused to be identified.
The conflict resulted in at least 28 people being injured. Seven Bangladeshi workers are still receiving treatment in local hospitals, but none of them has life-threatening injuries.
The Greek government has condemned the “inhuman, unprecedented and shameful” shooting.
“This unprecedented and shameful act is foreign to Greek ethics,” government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou said.
At the same time, the country’s main labor union, GSEE, has accused the government of failing to properly investigate conditions at Manolada.
“The criminal act in Manolada … shows the tragic results of labor exploitation, combined with a lack of control” [by the government labor inspectorate]”, a GSEE statement said. “In Manolada, and particularly in the strawberry plantations, a sort of state within a state has been created.”
Wednesday’s attack has been called the worst of all recent attacks on migrant strawberry workers in Greece, the country that mostly Asian and African asylum seekers see as a gateway to the European Union.
The Greek department of the Doctors of the World medical aid group suggested the shooting should be treated as a case of racist violence, a felony which carries more severe penalties.
“The protracted financial crisis, combined with a constantly growing mood of xenophobia and tolerance for racist violence, is leading to incidents of barbarity and brutality that … insult Greece,” the group said.
Following the violence, local supermarkets, Vasilopoulos and Chalkiadakis, announced that they would stop selling strawberries from the company that employed the alleged shooters.
Activists are now calling for a boycott of what they call slavery, by not buying Manolada berries.
“By boycotting #Manolada’s #bloodstrawberries you’re sending a clear message that you do not condone slavery,” reads the statement on Twitter.
However, there are some who believe that illegally hired immigrant workers should be deported from crisis stricken Greece.
With unemployment hitting a record 27 percent, anti-immigrant sentiment has been rising in the country.
Right-wing extremist political party, Golden Dawn, which holds 18 seats of the 300-member Parliament, said in a statement Thursday that they “condemn those who illegally employ illegal immigrants, taking the bread away from thousands of Greek families.”
“All illegal immigrants must be immediately deported,” it said.
Black and North African workers were excluded from Paris’s main railway station during a visit by Israel’s President amid fears they might be Muslim, it has been alleged.
The decision was reportedly made ahead of Shimon Peres’s arrival in the city on March 8 to discuss the Middle East peace process with President Francois Hollande.
The Telegraph reports Peres and his delegation were greeted at Paris Gare du Nord by non-excluded staff from France’s state-owned railway SNCF, and their baggage handling subsidiary, ITIREMIA.
The allegations are made in an official complaint by the left-wing SUD-Rail transport union, which claims deliberate steps were taken to ensure there were “no Muslim employees to welcome the Head of State of Israel.”
It adds the decision was “based on the appearance of employees”.
SUD-Rail spokesman Monique Dabat told Radio Internationale Française: “The employees noticed that anyone who was black or Arab was excluded from the job and when afterwards they demanded an explanation from the site boss they received the reply that it wasn’t because they were black or Arab but there couldn’t be any Muslims getting close to Shimon Peres.”
According to the SUD-Rail statement, employees were initially told by SNCF the measure was taken following “security demands” from the French Interior Ministry and the Israeli Embassy in Paris, both of which have denied all knowledge of the ban.
The Telegraph says SNCF has since admitted the order came from management, with a spokesman promising “a full investigation”.
The incident is being branded by Twitter users as “shocking”, “racist” and “shameful”.
There are an estimated six million Muslims in France, of which around 100,000 are thought to be converts, the New York Times reports.
The country, which has a population of around 65 million, defines itself as secular and publishes no official statistics on race or creed.
The incident is particularly embarrassing for the SNCF because it played a role in the deportation of Jews during the Second World War.
In 2011 it released a statement expressing “sorrow and regret” in which it conceded the SNCF’s equipment and staff were used to haul 76,000 French and other European Jews to Germany, where they were sent to death camps.
Fewer than 3,000 returned alive.
The railroad has repeatedly reiterated it was requisitioned for the Nazi war effort and had no choice in the matter, the Associated Press reports.
During the Rwandan genocide, when neighbors killed neighbors and friends betrayed friends, some crossed lines of hatred to protect each other.
At the time of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the Mufti of Rwanda, the most respected Muslim leader in the country, issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from participating in the killing of the Tutsi. As the country became a slaughterhouse, mosques became places of refuge where Muslims and Christians, Hutus and Tutsis came together to protect each other. KINYARWANDA is based on true accounts from survivors who took refuge at the Grand Mosque of Kigali and the madrassa of Nyanza. It recounts how the Imams opened the doors of the mosques to give refuge to the Tutsi and those Hutu who refused to participate in the killing.
“Mos Def said this to me;‘Andre 3000 is so good, that no one mentions him as an emcee. Cause he’s that good’.
It’s like, who’s the best emcee? Biggie, Jay-Z, Nas, who? Somebody says Andre 3000, it’s like, oh yea yea, well of course him. Like it’s not even mentioned, like that’s just a given.”
(via sniperwxlf)
“The lowest among us are no different from the highest, if you give them a chance…”
