Ben Bonsu    

 Nathan Walters

After a two week legal battle, the Sutton Guardian has won the right to name a pair of youths who carried out an appalling catalogue of serious sexual assaults on young girls over a 15 month period.

Ben Bonsu, 16, of Carshalton and Nathan Walters, 16, of Mitcham Junction, pleaded guilty to a total of 15 charges of serious sexual assault on five girls.

Last Monday Croydon Crown Court heard the boys had groped, bullied, abducted, detained and humiliated the girls, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

Both boys attended Stanley Park High School but were expelled when their actions came to light.

Last week the Sutton Guardian challenged a gagging order banning the publication of the naming of the teenagers, and their former school, which was made during their court hearing when they pleaded guilty to all counts of sexual assault. Sutton Council had argued for the gagging order to stay in place after the sentencing, claiming it wanted to protect victims and witnessses. But at a hearing yesterday Judge John Tanzer dismissed their arguments as “a smokescreen” designed to prevent damage to the reputation of the school.

He said: “There is no merit in mincing words, the primary concern was the reputation of the local school and any issue of identification was only added afterwards.”

Emails shown to the judge made clear that Stanley Park High, which is due for a £38 million redevelopment scheduled to open in 2010, had exerted considerable pressure on the council to keep its name out of the papers.

But the Sutton Guardian successfully argued that the offences were so grave that the youths should not be granted the cloak of anonymity and that the community had a right to know who they are.

We can now report that Bonsu was sentenced to 18 months and Walters to 12 months detention at a young offenders’ institution.

After sentencing, a relative of one of the defendants, who broke down as he was sentenced, shouted at the judge and had to be removed by security.

One impact statement, read out in court, said: “If I had the chance to speak to [the defendants] I would tell them I’m better than both of them because I would treat people how I would like to be treated.

“I would tell both of them how they had ruined the last two years of my life.”

In sentencing, Judge Tanzer said the boys had left their victims feeling “dirty, humiliated and used’’.

He said: “There is a distinction between childish horseplay and something far more serious.

“You thought you could openly discriminate against them simply because they were female.

“You blame the victims for their own misfortune at your own hands and now seem to find it a hurdle to comprehend that what you have done is very wrong… there is also evidence of an ostensible lack of remorse.’’

http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/3934641.We_name_youths_and_school_after_two_week_legal_battle/

ynews%3Fch=4226713%26cl=10847510%26lang=en

NEW YORK – Police security in subways and trains Wednesday after the government warned that al-Qaida suicide bombers were contemplating an attack on New York’s mass-transit systems during the holiday season. An internal memo obtained by The Associated Press says the FBI has received a “plausible but unsubstantiated” report that al-Qaida terrorists in late September may have discussed attacking the subway system.

The internal bulletin says al-Qaida terrorists “in late September may have discussed targeting transit systems in and around New York City. These discussions reportedly involved the use of suicide bombers or explosives placed on subway/passenger rail systems,” according to the document.

“We have no specific details to confirm that this plot has developed beyond aspirational planning, but we are issuing this warning out of concern that such an attack could possibly be conducted during the forthcoming holiday season,” according to the warning dated Tuesday.

A person briefed on the matter, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the intelligence-gathering work, said the threat may also be directed at the passenger rail lines running through New York, such as Amtrak and the Long Island Rail Road, which are particularly busy with Thanksgiving holiday travelers.

A federal law enforcement official said there’s no indication that anyone involved in the planning is in the United States. That official also spoke on condition of anonymity because it involved intelligence-gathering.

While law enforcement stepped up patrols around subways and trains, many commuters around the city were unfazed by the news and had not even heard of the threat.

“If you get scared that means they win,” commuter Omid Sima said on the platform of the subway below Rockefeller Center. “There’s always been terror warnings. I can’t change my life because of that.”

The Big Apple’s tightly packed passenger trains and subway cars have long been a source of concern for police officers — and a tempting target for would-be terrorists — but there is often disagreement as to how seriously authorities should take specific intelligence reports.

The city has more than 450 subway stations that handle millions of commuters every day.

A Pakistani immigrant was arrested and convicted for a scheme to blow up the subway station at Herald Square in 2004. There was also a planned cyanide attack on the subways by al-Qaida operatives that authorities say was called off in 2002; another aborted al-Qaida plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge in 2003; and a plot to bomb underwater train tunnels to flood lower Manhattan, which was broken up in 2006 by several arrests overseas.

Three years ago, authorities weighed reports that bombers might try to use baby strollers to bring explosives into city trains. Many security officials later concluded that was a false alarm.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said they have received an unsubstantiated report and as a result have “deployed additional resources in the mass transit system.”

While federal agencies regularly issue all sorts of advisory warnings, the language of this one is particularly blunt.

Intelligence and homeland security officials are working with local authorities to try to corroborate the information “and will continue to investigate every possible lead,” the memo says.

Rep. Peter King, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said authorities “have very real specifics as to who it is and where the conversation took place and who conducted it.”

“It certainly involves suicide bombing attacks on the mass transit system in and around New York and it’s plausible, but there’s no evidence yet that it’s in the process of being carried out,” King said.

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said the warning was issued “out of an abundance of caution going into this holiday season.”

No changes are being made to the nation’s threat level, or for transit systems at this time, he said.

FBI spokesman Richard Kolko confirmed only that his agency and the Homeland Security Department issued a bulletin Tuesday night to state and local authorities, and the information is being reviewed.

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A woman has been subjected to a serious sexual assault by a gang of men in Easton, Bristol.

The victim was approached by a man as she walked along Fishponds Road at about 2330 GMT on Friday 14 November.

As she went to assist him she was subjected to the assault by between five and seven men on wasteland at the back of the May Tree Park School.

Police hope two men seen inside a take away on Stapleton Road may hold vital information to help their inquiry.

CCTV images of the pair taken inside Texican Chicken about an hour after the attack have been released.

Police believe the men could hold vital information that would help with inquires and would like to hear from them, or from anyone who may have been in the area at the time of the attack.

The man who approached the victim is described as a black man, of slim build and in his late teens.

He was wearing a white Adidas hooded top with a black jacket over the top.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/7748047.stm

A British man who raped his daughters and fathered nine children by them has been jailed for life.

The 56-year-old man repeatedly raped his daughters, who between them went through 19 pregnancies, Shefield  Crown Court heard.

The campaign started when the women were aged between eight and 10. If they refused their father’s advances, they were badly beaten.

Judge Alan Goldsack QC ordered the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, to serve 25 life sentences that will run concurrently.

He said the minimum term the rapist should serve in jail should be 19-and-a-half years.

Judge Goldsack said: “The phrase ‘it is difficult to imagine a worse case’ is much overused and rarely, if ever, true. I am not going to say no case of rape within a family situation will ever come to light.”

But I can say that in nearly 40 years of dealing with criminal cases and 14 as a family judge the combination of aggravating circumstances here is the worst I have come across.

 The man admitted 25 rapes and four indecent assaults.

His actions echo those of the Austrian dungeon dad Joseph Fritzl, who fathered seven children with his daughter after imprisoning her in a cellar.

But unlike Fritzl, the British father controlled his victims with decades of mental torture.

The judge added: “I have little doubt that many members of the public hearing the facts of this case will consider either you should never be released from prison or only when you are old and infirm. I agree with that view.”

A spokesman for South Yorkshire police said the main concern was for the victims of “the terrible ordeal”.

He said:”You cannot begin to imagine the trauma and the suffering that (his daughters) have been through.”

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Rapist-Father-Given-Life-Sentence-After-Raping-His-Daughters/Article/200811415161589?lpos=UK_News_First_UK_News_Article_Teaser_Region_0&lid=ARTICLE_15161589_Rapist_Father_Given_Life_Sentence_After_Raping_His_Daughters

As the roster of corporations and financial institutions in line for government bailouts seems to grow, some public-policy advocates in Washington are calling on policymakers to focus more efforts on the nation’s poorest. The ranks of the destitute are growing quietly but alarmingly as much of the world focuses on troubles surrounding Wall Street. “Recent data show poverty is already rising quite substantially,” says Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “There is a strong potential for more hardship and destitution than we have seen in this country in a number of decades.”

Greenstein’s center released a new study on Monday projecting a sharp rise in the number of people living below the poverty line, which is roughly $21,200 annually for a family of four, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. An estimated 36.5 million Americans currently live below the poverty line, but those numbers will probably increase by as many as 10.3 million if current projections for the depth and duration of the recession hold true. According to the center’s analysis, the number of poor children will grow by as many as 3.3 million. And the number of children in deep poverty, those in families living on less than half the wages of the official poverty line, will climb by as many as 2 million. (See pictures from John Edwards’ tour of poverty-stricken America.)

Signs of the recession’s impact on America’s impoverished are increasingly apparent, Greenstein says, pointing to a dramatic rise in food-stamp caseloads in recent months. The number of people using food stamps has risen 9.6%, or roughly 2.6 million people, from August 2007 to August 2008, the last period for which data are available. Food banks around the country are reporting longer lines even as donations are falling.

By historical comparison, the expected rise in the number of impoverished in this recession is relatively normal. During the recession years of the 1980s, the number of people in poverty rose by 9.2 million, an increase of more than a third. The recession of the 1990s was not quite as deep but still increased the number of people in poverty by 6.5 million. But those falling into poverty now face harder prospects and need more government help, Greenstein says, because many social safety nets have been cut away since past economic downturns. (See pictures of the recession of 1958.)

A number of policy changes at both state and federal levels have left basic cash-assistance programs scarce, the center’s study argues. State general-assistance programs were largely eliminated across the country in the late 1980s and early ’90s, except for programs benefiting the disabled. On the federal level, only about 40% of families eligible for cash assistance under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program actually receive it. That is about half the percentage of families eligible for the program’s predecessor (the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program) that received benefits during the recessions of earlier decades.

President-elect Barack Obama voiced new concern over the economy on Monday when announcing picks for his White House economic team, saying a new economic-stimulus package was needed right away in addition to the ongoing efforts to pump more than $700 billion in federal rescue funds into ailing businesses like Citigroup. There was no indication how any of that round of spending will reach the growing numbers of the nation’s neediest.

Translated from Spanish:

According to a law projection, it would prevail between 2009 and 2010. The measurement, without precedents in Europe, is a reaction to the global economic crisis. Although it looks to contain labor imbalances, it express the serious recession that affects the country.

By: Julio Alga6naraz
The minister of the Interior, Maroni Robert, announced yesterday in the Parliament his support to the initiative of North Liga – of which he comprises to close by two years the Italian borders to the entrance of immigrants. In case the new law of security that has entered the Senate approves with this amendment, Italy will become the first European country that takes this extreme measurement. North Liga, whose leader is minister Umberto Bossi, often has been accused of xenophobe, racist and separatist.

The catholic weekly magazine Christian Family, the sold magazine more of Italy, said yesterday in an editorial that the propose law “is unworthy of a State of right”.

“The economic situation that involves to Italy and the other countries of the world demands a kind evaluation of the policies ligatures to the world of immigration”, said Maroni before Deputies. “Until a few months ago it was possible to be thought about coming like in the years last with the decrees that establish the flows of new extracommunity citizens, with regulating work permission”. But the crisis has changed the situation – it added and “a moratorium of two years to the immigratory flows would be useful”.

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