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In a report made public today, Africa Watch, an organization based in the United States and Britain, said the junta of Lieut. Gen. Omar al-Bashir, which overthrew a democratically elected Government in June, combines militarism and Islamic fundamentalism. The report called this ''a new and very dangerous phenomenon'' for the Sudan.
Civilian opponents of the Government in Khartoum, including trade-union leaders, doctors, lawyers and university professors, have been targets of the new regime, the report said. Tribes in the southern Sudan are victims of rights abuses perpetuated by both sides in the increasingly deadly civil war, it added.
The United States regards the Sudan as strategically important because of its size and location; it borders eight African countries, including Egypt and Libya.
But Washington, a major supplier of aid to the longtime military-based Government of Gen. Gaafar al-Nimeiry, who led the sub-Saharan country from 1969 to 1985, appears to have lost whatever influence it had in Khartoum as the new junta increasingly turns toward militant Arab countries, including Libya.
American economic and military aid to the Sudan ended last month under a law that bans aid to a junta that has overthrown a democracy. Washington continues to provide food aid to both sides in the civil conflict, for distribution to victims of the largely war-induced famine.
The Africa Watch report provides detailed testimony about a new and shadowy security agency created by General Bashir's Government to intimidate its opposition. Known as Islamic Security, or the the Security of the Revolution, the agency has been responsible for mass arrests and ill treatment of political prisoners, the report said, quoting detainees who have recently been released.
The prisoners were usually tortured at intelligence safe-houses in Khartoum, the report said. One of the places where detainees were tortured was the the club of the Bar Association, which was disbanded by the new leader; the room where beatings took place had the words ''Human Rights Chamber'' scrawled on its door, Africa Watch said.
One person arrested on the day of the coup told Africa Watch that the new security agency was controlled by the most radical members of the National Islamic Front, a well-financed fundamentalist Islamic group with senior positions in the army.
Physicians who led a strike in November were particularly badly treated, said the detainee, who requested anonymity. Dr. Tariq Ismail, a member of the doctors' union, told another detainee that he was arrested, blindfolded and taken to a safe-house, where he was forced at gunpoint to sit in ice water in a bathtub.
Paradise Thursday Night Farmers Market: 5 p.m.-dusk. Corner of Black Olive Drive and Pearson Road. Rain or shine. Weekly.
Chico Thursday Night Market: 6- 9 p.m. Free. Farm-fresh produce, food, crafts and live entertainment. No animals. Broadway between Second and Fifth streets. Weekly.
Chico Caberet: 7:30 p.m. The Little Bo Peep Show. A broadway burlesque-style “fun-raiser.” Mature audiences only. Performances run Thursday, Friday, Saturday. 895-0245.
Bill of Rights Defense Committee: 5 p.m. Chico Peace & Justice Center, 526 Broadway; freedom@chicobordc.org. First, third Thursdays.
Sons of Italy: 6:30 p.m. meeting. Downstairs, St. John”s Catholic Church Hall, 435 Chestnut St., Chico. 345-7911. Third Thursday.
Chico Republican Women Federated: 11:30 a.m. Chico Elks Lodge, 1705 Manzanita Ave. 891-1699. Third Thursday.
Chico Optimist Club: noon at Cozy Diner, 1695 Mangrove Ave. Topic for June 16 meet: A renewed expression of optimism in Chico; how to be a “Friend to Youth” and engender “Respect for Law” in the Chico community. Celebrate the resurgence of this club at this first meeting in two years. Larry Jendro, 533-1413. First, third Thursdays.
MacIntosh Users Group: 6:30 p.m. novices, 7:30 p.m. Masonic Family Center, 1110 W. East Ave., Chico. Bill Peart, 893-5049. Third Thursday.
Americana Corvette Club: 7 p.m. meets at Logan”s Roadhouse in Chico on July 21, with discussion of recent club run to Coos Bay, Ore. Meetings alternate between Chico and Oroville quarterly. All Corvette owners welcome. Tom Huston, 345-1574; americanacorvetteclub.org. Third Thursday.
Democratic Action Club of Chico: 7 p.m. program, 8 p.m. business meeting. Avenue 9 Gallery, 180 E. Ninth Ave. Robert Woods, 893-8656. Third Thursday.
Bute County Wisdom Council: 7:30 p.m. Chico library, 1108 Sherman Ave. 893-8033. Third Thursday.
Alzheimer”s Association Caregivers Support Group: 2-4 p.m. Aldersgate Methodist Church, 2869 Cohasset Road, Room 4, Chico. 895-9661. Third Thursday.
Place at end of every calendar: Send Planner listings to lifestyle@chicoer.com, fax to 342-3617 or mail to Enterprise-Record, P.O. Box 9, Chico, CA 95927.
The Snowmass Village Rotary Club is launching a new fundraiser that incorporates a favorite theme in the community.
The Mammoth Meltdown, inspired by the 2010-11 fossil dig in nearby Ziegler Reservoir, kicks off at 7:15 a.m. today. That’s when the club will place a 3-foot-high steel sculpture of “Snowy” the mammoth on an icy pond on the Snowmass Club golf course.
Participants can pay $5 to guess the month, day, hour and minute that Snowy will fall through the ice. Two clocks have been calibrated and attached to Snowy’s base. When the clocks are submerged, they will stop, and that will be the winning time.
The closest guess will win a grand prize of 50 percent of all ticket sales. Second and third place will win donated prizes.
Data about the pond and historical weather data are available on the Mammoth Meltdown website.
Funds raised will support any of the Rotary’s ongoing efforts, which include local nonprofits, vocational scholarships and dictionaries for valley students and international grants.
For more information or to enter a guess, visit http://www.mammothmeltdown.com.
The Jazz Vintage is a celebration of our rich history in retro running. Utilizing the original features of our most iconic silhouette, the Jazz Vintage delivers a timeless style. Available in a unisex sizing range, the Jazz has stood the test of time and solidified its place as a classic in the fashion sneaker game.
Shiny Things is a Sydney edutech startup that develops mobile maths apps for primary schools.
Founder Mat Peterson spoke to Techworld Australia about the startup’s success following a two-week vacation to New Zealand, his first holiday since he began the company two-and-a-half years ago.
The company recently celebrated a milestone of 1.3 million app downloads on Apple's App Store.
Peterson said he discovered the problem he wanted to solve 15 years ago, when he was still in school and Australia’s laptop program was rolling out.
“At that point in time, technology was seen as the solution to the classroom, but in the end it actually made things a lot more complex,” he said.
Shiny Things has 12 people on staff, including two educators focussed on content, three designers who come up with ideas for presenting that content, and four engineers who translate the concepts into working apps.
The startup specialises in mathematics for ages six to eleven, and its most popular app is Quick Maths with nearly 400,000 downloads globally, said Peterson.
What makes Quick Maths different than the non-intuitive computer math programs of old is that users use actual handwriting on the tablet screen, he said.
Today, Shiny Things has 10 apps on the Apple app store. There are three more apps in development that are expected for release in the next two months, said Peterson.
All the apps are sold for $2 or $3 in the Apple store. While teachers and parents are the ones buying the app, Peterson said serving students is an important priority as well.
To strike that balance, Shiny Things has spent a great deal time meeting with parents, teachers and students. The startup is constantly collecting feedback and releasing enhancements to the apps, he said.
Peterson invested $2 million of his own money in the startup. He said much of that money came from a previous venture – a software company started in 2003 that made media tools for Macintosh.
Shiny Things has received a few government grants, he said. It has received money from the R&D tax incentive and the Export Market Development Grant (70 to 80 percent of Shiny Things’ revenue comes from other countries).
With all those Thomas the Tank Engine mods for popular games, it’s weird no one really went into LEGO territory yet. Andrewmfilms fills the gap with his awesomely animated clip featuring Portal 2, Counter-Strike, and Bioshock with minifigures.
Skyrim’s there, too. Not an FPS, of course, but when it comes to modding, it has to be included.
Poster courtesy of the University of Virginia, School of Architecture.
All lectures begin at 6 p.m. in Campbell Hall, Room 153, unless otherwise noted. Listed below are upcoming events.
Dates and times are subject to change. For updates, visit arch.virginia.edu.
Glen Miller's Vera Roasting Co. infuses Arabica beans with resveratrol to achieve a heart-healthy effect.
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — An organic chemist currently serving as chair of the University of New Hampshire’s Chemistry Department has developed a coffee that provides the same amount of antioxidants found in red wine.
The Portsmouth Herald reports Glen Miller’s Vera Roasting Co. infused Arabica beans with resveratrol during the roasting of its CoffVee product to achieve its heart-healthy effect. Resveratrol is the naturally occurring antioxidant found in the skins of grapes used to make red wine.
The Vera Roasting Co. officially launched on Dec. 8.
The Romeikes are devout Christians from Germany who wanted to homeschool their children because of what they perceived as the secularist agenda in German public schools. In the United States, the right to homeschool ones’ own children is accepted, although frequently mocked by the left. The homeschoool movement is thriving in the United States, but in Germany it is illegal, a holdover from Nazi-era law.
The Romeikes fled to the United States in 2008 after they faced mounting fines and the potential of imprisonment. The Romeikes sought asylum, and were granted that asylum by Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman in a January 26, 2010 decision after a hearing which included not only the Romeikes but also expert witnesses on homeschooling in Germany.
October 9, 2006, [the Romeikes] got a letter from the mayor informing them that they would suffer a fine of about $45 per child, per day, and if necessary, the government would use force. The Romeikes ignored that. On October 20, 2006, two armed police officers came to the house to take the children to school. This produced a very upsetting scene for the children, the children were crying and were upset, as the three children that were of school age were herded off to go to school. Apparently, the police had no warrant or other authorization to do this, however, the Romeikes were not aware that they had any basis to resist legally, so they allowed the children to go to school. However, Mrs. Romeike retrieved the children at lunch hour.
On October 23, 2006, the police appeared in force this time to take the children to school. However, the neighborhood apparently had been alerted and neighbors blocked the police from taking action. At that point, the government backed off for a while, obviously they were not sure what to do. Apparently these situations are fairly rare and apparently had not occurred in this town previously.
In December of 2006, the government began to get tough, they informed the Romeikes that the children must attend school and there would be a fine of about $672 initially, which would only escalate in the future if they continued to resist.
Also the mayor informed them that in addition to the fines, which would escalate, that they might lose custody of the children. There is a social work organization, in Germany called the Jugendamt, which apparently means youth office in German, and they have the authority to remove children from parents under certain circumstances.
Respondents did go to Court over this and explained the situation. The Judge did not accept their explanation, he found them guilty of not sending their children to school, which is a crime.
Respondents took various legal measures over the ensuing months and they were not successful at any level. They faced escalating fines which would eventually be more than they could afford to pay. The applicant makes about 12,000 Euros a month, and the family had been fined about 7,000 Euros at the time they left the country and the fines would only increase. If they were not able to pay the fines, they also stood to lose their property, but most importantly, they stood to lose custody of their children, and that was their main fear. There also is a possibility that they could have been sent to jail as these are criminal statutes.
[T]his law has not always existed in Germany, it was enacted in 1938, when Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party was in power in Germany, and it was enacted specifically to prevent parents from interfering with state control of their children, and we all know what kind of state control Hitler had in mind. It certainly was not for the good of the children, not even facial.
Now obviously Germany has changed since 1938. Germany is a Democratic country, Germany is an ally of the United States, and Germany does provide due process of law. However, this one incidence of Nazi legislation appears to still be in full force and effect, and that is the situation that Mr. Donnelly described, and the Romeikes fear.
[In] the case of Melissa Vusekros. . .when her parents kept her out of school, she was treated as if she had a psychiatric affliction known as school phobia and she was actually placed in an asylum for the mentally ill while she was tested. This frankly is reminiscent of the Soviet Union treating political opposition as a psychiatric problem, not only a human rights violation, it is a misuse of the psychiatric profession….
Mr. Donnelly [an expert witness] described the judicial decisions, in Germany, not so much being interested in the welfare of the children, as being interested in stamping out groups that want to run a parallel society, and apparently there is a fair amount of vitriol involved in this attempt to stamp out these parallel societies.
[The Romeikes] have not shown that their religion, their religious-based desire to homeschool, or their status as homeschoolers is a central reason that the compulsory school attendance law was or will be enforced enforced against them….
Having not shown any pretext in the enforcement of the compulsory school attendance law against them, the applicants did not establish a well-founded fear of persecution or the higher threshold of a clear probablility of persecution. Accordingly, we will sustain the DHS’s appeal, and order the applicants’ removal from the United States to Germany.
Thus, what Americans traditionally would have deemed a clear case of persecution becomes, to the current left-liberal way of thinking, “law enforcement.” I can’t help but wonder what other infringements on liberty will one day soon be shrugged off as mere law enforcement.
The legal arguments turn on the religious component of homeschooling in Germany. Judge Burman clearly made factual findings based on testimony which supported the Romeikes’ asylum application, only to have those findings disregarded by the Immigration Board of Appeal based on more generalized notions of the German system. This could prove a decisive factor.
What is important for now is the somewhat shocking situation faced by homeschoolers in Germany, and the lengths to which the government will go to enforce its will. There’s a lesson there.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday attacked the previous Congress Government for its inability to bring Kartarpur Sahib under India during partition.
Releasing a commemorative coin as part of the 350th birth anniversary celebrations of 10th Sikh guru Guru Gobind Singh, Modi came down on the Congress for the 1984 riots that took place following the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Referring to the Kartapur corridor, he said now devotees do not have to look at the shrine in Pakistan using binoculars, they could visit the place without visa using the corridor.
An important place of our guru was only a few kilometers away. But it could not be made part (of India during partition) ... The corridor is an effort to reduce the damage,” he said in a veiled attack on the then Congress Government.
Guru Nanak passed away in Kartarpur on September 22, 1539.
Former prime minister Manmohan Singh, former chief justice of India J S Khehar and several Sikh leaders were present at the Prime Minister’s residence to participate in the event. Modi said be it Guru Nanak or Guru Gobind Singh, they have taught us to be on the side of justice. Following the path shown by them, the central government is trying to get justice for the people who suffered during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, Modi said.
“The central government is making efforts to get justice for the period of injustice which started in 1984. For decades, mothers, sisters, daughters and sons have shed tears, the law will deliver justice, wipe (their) tears,” the PM said referring to the riots that took place following the assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi.
The PM released a Rs 350 denomination commemorative silver coin to mark the 350th birth anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh. He described the founder of the Khalsa sect as a warrior and a poet who had immense knowledge of religious scriptures.
Modi said the government now plans to celebrate the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak across the country. Modi said while the event will be held various states and union territories, Indian embassies abroad will also organise programmes as part of the celebrations Guru Nanak was born on April 15, 1469, in Nankana Sahib, now Pakistan. Modi said, for the last four years, his government has been making comprehensive efforts to bring the cultural and knowledge heritage of India to the world.
“From Yoga to Ayurveda, the country has succeeded in re-establishing its status. This work continues,” he said.
Monday, March 4, 2013 ratings — New episodes: The Biggest Loser, Deception, Rules Of Engagement, The Bachelor, Bones, The Following, 90210, and The Carrie Diaries. Episode reruns: Castle, How I Met Your Mother, 2 Broke Girls, Mike & Molly, and Hawaii Five-0.
8pm – The Bachelor: 2.7 in the demo (-7% change) with 8.43 million.
10pm – Castle: (rerun) 1.4 in the demo with 6.76 million.
8pm – How I Met Your Mother: (rerun) 1.6 in the demo with 5.44 million.
8:30pm – Rules of Engagement: 2.2 in the demo (-19% change) with 6.86 million.
9pm – 2 Broke Girls: (rerun) 1.7 in the demo with 6.35 million.
9:30pm – Mike & Molly: (rerun) 1.7 in the demo with 6.62 million.
10pm – Hawaii Five-0: (rerun) 1.3 in the demo with 5.61 million.
8pm – The Carrie Diaries: 0.3 in the demo (-25% change) with 1.1 million.
9pm – 90210: 0.3 in the demo (0% change) with 0.65 million.
8pm – Bones: 2.2 in the demo (-4% change) with 8.20 million.
9pm – The Following: 2.8 in the demo (0% change) with 8.69 million.
8pm – The Biggest Loser: 2.1 in the demo (-5% change) with 5.9 million.
10pm – Deception: 1.1 in the demo (-8% change) with 3.27 million.
Check out this 40 acre recreational parcel. High demand location with great hunting, excellent build sites and located between the Heart of the Lakes and the US 131 Expressway. Property has diverse mix of open/food plot areas, high ground with good variety of hard/softwoods and some low/wetland areas. Call for additional details and to set up your private viewing.
Jersey Shore: Family Vacation star Ronnie Ortiz-Magro and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Jen Harley, made nice for her 31st birthday on Saturday.
The pair enjoyed a yacht ride off the coast of Florida to celebrate the occasion while surrounded by friends. Ortiza-Magro shared a video on his Instagram Story in which he happily shows off the gang’s yacht while shirtless.
Harley also shared a photo from the gathering. In it, she and her friend, Jessica Ouaknine, happily pose for the camera while using a fun hearts filter.
“Happy birthday my love,” Ouaknine captioned a photo of them sunbathing together in skimpy swimsuits while on the yacht. She also shared a group photo in which Harley and Ortiz-Magro embrace.
This festive day comes less than a week after the 32-year-old reality star posted a photo of himself with a black eye on Oct. 24, implying it came from Harley.
"Sorry for lying to my friends and family, sometimes u love people so much [you're] willing to lie and the hurt the people that love u the most to protect,” Ortiz-Magro captioned a closeup photo of his face showcasing some bruising.

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