Charlize Theron seemed really disappointed when she announced France as the 4th team in South Africa's group. Hooray for Italy getting an "easy" group, just hope they don't underestimate their opponents.

Here are the groups:

Group A
South Africa
Mexico
Uruguay
France

Group B
Argentina
Nigeria
South Korea
Greece

Group C
England
USA
Algeria
Slovenia

Group D
Germany
Australia
Serbia
Ghana

Group E
Holland
Denmark
Japan
Cameroon

Group F
Italy
Paraguay
New Zealand
Slovakia

Group G
Brazil
North Korea
Ivory Coast
Portugal

Group H
Spain
Switzerland
Honduras
Chile

who cares, WE BEAT RUSSIA and are going to South Africa in 2010

Whites of Portuguese, Dutch, German, British and French ancestry make up about 7% of the population; they form the second-largest population of European ancestry, both in terms of percentage and actual numbers, in Sub-Saharan Africa after South Africa.[28] Most Namibian whites and nearly all those of mixed race speak Afrikaans and share similar origins, culture, and religion as the white and coloured populations of South Africa. A smaller proportion of whites (around 30,000) trace their family origins directly back to German colonial settlers and maintain German cultural and educational institutions. Nearly all Portuguese settlers came to the country from the former Portuguese colony of Angola.[29]

- Wikipedia

I was looking forward to seeing a hot black chick though.

Alright, people. One of my best friends goes to the University of Pittsburgh and he was in the middle of the whole thing. Most of the "protesters" were just students curious about what was going on. He wrote this about it all:

"This note is for my friends who are not in Pittsburgh and have not yet been given a fairly comprehensive version of what has been going on here. If you have been seeing my wall posts, you'll know that something bad happened in Pittsburgh, but if you want my story, here it is...

On Thursday and Friday September 24-25, the G-20 World Leader's Summit occurred in Pittsburgh. The summit involved the leaders of the United States, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. The purpose of the summit is to have a forum for the major world leaders about the global economic crisis. Pittsburgh was chosen to be the location for the summit in order to highlight its economic recovery after the city's manufacturing industry collapsed about 40 years ago.

The G-20 is always met with protesters for various causes, including global warming awareness, socialism, peoples' rights in other countries, anti-free-trade, and anti-war, and anarchy. The city of Pittsburgh was required to bring in police forces from all regions of the state of Pennsylvania and other nearby states.

On the evening of the 24th, the summit began with a dinner in the Phipps Conservatory, a plant exhibition hall (really quite a nice place) just under a mile from my dorm in the borough of Oakland. The University cancelled classes after 4:00 PM that day in order to ensure that students did not have to be outside if they did not wish to. During the day of the 24th, several protests had been broken up by riot police. At about 7:00 PM a small protest began at the Schenley Plaza. (from this point on, I will be referring to locations on campus, please refer to the map I posted at:< http://photos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs209.snc1/7620_178174626232_559501232_4081545_8066324_n.jpg>)

I went there to investigate myself at about 8:00 PM. The protest itself was fairly small, only about a hundred or so people total, with only a handful of protesters. There was some live music and dancing, courtesy of the Hare Krishna. Despite the fact that the protest was fairly small and peaceful, there were several hundred police forming a perimeter around the plaza, which is under a quarter-mile from the Conservatory. All of the Police were in riot gear, which covered any form of identification they may have had; they were also all armed with lethal and non-lethal weapons.

Around 9:00, I decided to return to my dorm. At 10:15, I overheard someone saying that they saw fire on Forbes Avenue. I decided to go out and investigate. At this point, the street had been flooded by curious students, and would remain that way until the police removed them. Several dumpsters had been pushed into the intersection of Forbes and Atwood by anarchist protesters. The next intersection had a overturned dumpster with flaming garbage spilled on the street. Several shop windows had been broken by a protester from California, however the media initially implicated that it had been students who were responsible.

I reached the lawn of the Pitt Union, and at about 10:45 the police began to multiply rapidly. They also brought in several scary-looking trucks with large dish-shaped things on them. This turned out to be a Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), which emits a loud, scary noise which is physically disabling within a certain radius. At 11:00 PM, the trucks began playing a pre-recorded message declaring that the people in the streets had become an "illegal gathering" and that the crowd was to disperse, or they could be subject to arrest or attack with "less lethal" weaponry (does that mean you're less dead when you get hit?)

At this, I decided to retreat to Forbes Hall. Other people were not fortunate enough to get out of there as quickly as I did, and became exposed to a hail of "OC" gas, rubber bullets, mace, LRAD blasts, and nightsticks. The University unfortunately decided to lock down the residence halls as the police approached, giving the retreating students nowhere to go to escape from the police. One of my friends was arrested while holding open the doors to the Litchfield Towers residence hall lobby so that escaping students had somewhere to go. She was dragged outside of the doorway, beaten to the ground, not given any rights, held for five hours, and released without any charge as of yet.

At the time, I was unaware of this, but I watched the police advance through the lower campus (residential area, mainly between Forbes and Fifth avenues) via the live feed on the local news. When I noticed that they were three blocks away from Forbes Hall, I went to the patio on the second floor of the hall (out of reach of anyone who didn't live there or have a friend there). At about midnight, the cops were in front of the hall, still chasing a small group of protesters despite being nearly a mile from the original protest ground and being practically at the end of the campus. Without any real warning, they threw several canisters of "OC" gas onto the patio. Unknown to me at the time, several also entered the lobby and threatened to mace several students who were unable to enter the hall due to the lockdown.

OC gas is for all intents and purposes the same as tear gas. When you inhale it, your lungs and throat itch and you can't do anything but cough. If it gets in your eyes, you become partially blind and it feels like your eyes are melting. I was several feet away from a grenade and was directly exposed to it for several seconds as my fellow students and I tried to escape. I ran to my bathroom on the sixth floor and flushed my eyes and choked for five minutes. The third floor had window open out of which the students had been looking, it was filled with gas, and the students living on the third floor became refugees for several hours while it cleared.

Shortly after passing Forbes hall, the police attack ended. They left Oakland with 42 arrests (most were let go that morning), and a large number of unfairly treated, assaulted, and pissed students. The university itself has yet to make any statement regarding Thursday night, but the Mayor of Pittsburgh and Chief of Police have stated that they are "proud of how well the police handled the situation". They are apparently not fans of students either.

I will save my personal commentary and descriptions of the aftermath for another note. However, here are a few links that you will find interesting.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNeD4rHUF4A> a compilation of student-made videos from 9/24.
The videos are of varying quality and contain some harsh language and violence. These will give you an idea of what the students here experienced (I know the person being dragged away at 2:35)
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6aRrQz7224> This video was not taken by me, but it was taken from my vantage point when Forbes Hall was attacked
<http://www.pittnews.com/> Pitt's student newspaper, featuring independent coverage of the G-20 (and some rather good photography, the ones I took came out terribly)
<http://www.pittbriefly.com/> A blog on which many videos of the G-20 'riot' have been posted. Some of these cannot be found on Youtube.

Thank you for reading this,
......."

Now, I am from Denmark, and this is a story that is not uncommon in Scandinavia. I can tell you that the translation roughly correspond to what is being said in the video. But I can also say that the angle of the headline, `Firemen and Police in Sweden attacked by Muslims´, is not corresponding to the newsstory.

This is a story about violent young second generation immigrants and refugees. Almost every major city in Scandinavia has a ghetto with these immigrants living in it. Here it's Hisingen, Göteborg, in Sweden, but this is not a rare story.

Now the problem is real, young people in the ghetto are getting involved in crime. But that is the same picture as you see in the black ghettos in South Africa and indeed in America. These youths might identify with islam, but they are not a product of islamism. There are imams and others working together with social workers and the community to prevent the crimes.
They are just a bunch of young kids with a common heritage and nothing to do with their lives. They do not, and i know this by fact, live by the sharia code of law. Most of them have never even attended friday prayer.

Only the most rightwing are claiming this to be a purely religious problem (we are litaraly talking about the nazis here). The opponents of islamism in Scandinavia do not claim that islam is the primary reason for the problems in the various ghettos, if they do, they do it in the more broader sense of islamic culture.
The discussion is much wider, you can not look at this story without looking at the other controversies surrounding this. How many refugees should be allowed to put up permanent residence, should they be allowed to work from the refugee camps.

Your sources are very onesided and do not support their primary claim, that it is muslim crime. They do not attempt to make distinctions between muslims and immigrants or people with arabic heritage. They are not backed by any proper sources themselves and are biased.
An example could be the article from healinguniverse.com starts out with a false claim, the rioting in Aarhus was broadly covered in all of the danish media.

I may be able to come up with some more credible sources from Sweden, as well as Denmark and Norway. Some newspapers do make an english version of their normal paper.

>> ^bcglorf:
>> ^alizarin:
>> ^zor:
Great sift! I've never seen anything like that before. Now, on to find the assholes who made those and sold them.

That'd be us - "mines found in Cambodia have been manufactured in the US, China, Vietnam, the former USSR and East Germany, the former Czechoslovakia, India, Chile, South and North Korea, Thailand, Iran, Iraq, South Africa, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Poland." - article
As of 2007, a total of 158 nations have agreed to [ban landmines]. Thirty-seven countries have not agreed to the ban, including China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and the United States.
We deserve a swift kick to the nuts!

Actually, the particular mines this guy is defusing would NOT be us(the western world). The video description is clear that the Khmer Rouge(communists) were the ones that laid the fields he is clearing.
I know it may seem anal but the details of how these atrocities went down are important to remember and have straight.



I believe the question was "who made the landmines" not "who laid the landmines" in which case the WEsterners would be among the culprits.
"The CMAC reports that mines found in Cambodia have been manufactured in the US, China, Vietnam, the former USSR and East Germany, the former Czechoslovakia, India, Chile, South and North Korea, Thailand, Iran, Iraq, South Africa, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Poland."

"I know it may seem anal but the details of how these atrocities went down are important to remember and have straight."

>> ^alizarin:
>> ^zor:
Great sift! I've never seen anything like that before. Now, on to find the assholes who made those and sold them.

That'd be us - "mines found in Cambodia have been manufactured in the US, China, Vietnam, the former USSR and East Germany, the former Czechoslovakia, India, Chile, South and North Korea, Thailand, Iran, Iraq, South Africa, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Poland." - article
As of 2007, a total of 158 nations have agreed to [ban landmines]. Thirty-seven countries have not agreed to the ban, including China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and the United States.
We deserve a swift kick to the nuts!


Actually, the particular mines this guy is defusing would NOT be us(the western world). The video description is clear that the Khmer Rouge(communists) were the ones that laid the fields he is clearing. The swift kick in the nuts is still shared with us for being the ones that carpet bombed Cambodia into the stone ages 'just in case', paving the way for the Khmer Rouge to commence their own even worse genocide of the country.

I know it may seem anal but the details of how these atrocities went down are important to remember and have straight.

And the biggest reason for opposing the landmine ban is situations like Korea were tonnes of explosives hidden in land mines along the border play a big role in PREVENTING violence.

And yes, this guy rocks.

>> ^zor:
Great sift! I've never seen anything like that before. Now, on to find the assholes who made those and sold them.


That'd be us - "mines found in Cambodia have been manufactured in the US, China, Vietnam, the former USSR and East Germany, the former Czechoslovakia, India, Chile, South and North Korea, Thailand, Iran, Iraq, South Africa, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Poland." - article

As of 2007, a total of 158 nations have agreed to [ban landmines]. Thirty-seven countries have not agreed to the ban, including China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and the United States.

We deserve a swift kick to the nuts!

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Kevin Richardson, reserve, captivity, south africa, pride, king' to 'Kevin Richardson, reserve, captivity, south africa, pride, king, huge balls' - edited by EndAll

Tags for this video have been changed from 'lion, cage, animal attack, south africa' to 'lion, cage, animal attack, south africa, dont worry, hes just playing' - edited by calvados

Got one at 14
http://www.videosift.com/video/Elephant-takes-down-a-big-tree-in-South-Africa

Mashiki, what metrics are you using to measure racism? I think your saying one group or another is most racist based on nothing but your feelings and anecdotes is ridiculous. What tangible, measurable results were there from blacks hating blacker people, for example? That's how I determine who is the most racist.

And in the US, whites are able to and do enforce their bigoted sentiment on other groups quite often and quite easily. Look at redlining, the criminal justice system, job discrimination, hate violence, etc. How have american blacks oppressed american whites? Sure, you can dig and find a some very rare cases of individuals doing this, but show me where the average american white man gets the bum deal that the average Zimbabwean white man would get from their black (or latino, or asian) countrymen.

It's not a perfect world for american whites by any means, but I don't know any american white crazy enough to trade places with an american black. Maybe you do, since you think minorities get a "free ride". It-is-to-laugh.

As I said pp, racism is a matter of perspective. The countries I cited are making demonstrable efforts to be egalitarian with respect to ethnicity, just like we in the US are. In Singapore, a chinese was jailed for posting a racist anti-malay website; if america had the same standards, how many would be jailed? In Malaysia, several ethnic and religious groups take part in the government; while Americans have only recently seen their first muslim congressman. South Africa has shown great restraint to the white population there in light of the history of apartheid. Kenya is actively making strides and overtures to its Muslim population and for reconciliation of its various tribal groups; even african whites fled there from Zimbabwe. And finally, like it or not, in 20 years blacks will dominate brasil; the demographic math there is more pronounced than for arabs in Israel. Even now brasilian blacks are fighting discrimination and making measurable gains.

All of these examples still don't help your flimsy racial theory that puts whites as the most angelic beings in the universe. A Singaporean chinese will say the same. A Kenyan black will say the same. A Malay Malaysian will say the same. Any number of ethnic people who dominate their respective countries sing the same tune. Hell, even the arabs in this video would say the same.

But, only a cursory glance at (even recent) history would show that is simply not the case for any of these groups.

I don't think it's worth the effort finding sources and news reports for your longde, but:

Singapore
The Chinese in Singapore are extremely ethnocentric. See the treatment of Indians, Africans and Filipina/o workers that have no legal recourse in this Chinese-centered meritocracy.

Malaysia
You must be joking. It's illegal to change your religion in this country, unless you’re converting to Islam. Ethnic Malays have an easy-going business process while the Chinese are kept down in bureaucracy and the expectation of bribes.

South Africa
Again, are you serious? How about their treatment of "refugees" from Zimbabwe last summer.

Kenya
Now I know you're joking. Kenya, like most of Africa is completely engaged in ethnic squabbles. The Luo people are particularly violent. Cities and slums are frequently broken down into sectors where different ethnic groups live. Sporadic violence is common place and the influx of Sudanese which are left to amass wherever they can find a spot is adding more kindle to the fire. Elections are a particularly dangerous period where candidates are endorsed by riots.

Brazil
If your skin is darker than #999966, expect to paid about half what a paler person makes. In no other country in the Americas is being black such a handicap.

Not even the US does what you described: but here is my list: Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa, Kenya, Brazil, .....