Rowdy Umno protesters disrupt city life

About 300 supporters of Umno and Perkasa stage a violent protest against the state government and Bersih.

GEORGE TOWN: Some 300 supporters from Umno, Perkasa and an unregistered NGO Suara Anak Anak Mamak Pulau Pinang held a nearly three-hour noisy march and violent protest in the city centre, condemning both the Pakatan Rakyat state government and the Bersih 2.0 rally.

The crowd first gathered at the historic Masjid Kapitan Keling after Friday prayers at 2.30pm.

Chanting anti-state government and anti-Bersih slogans, they then marched for about 1.5km from the mosque to Komtar via Lebuh Chulia and Jalan Penang.

Their march against the traffic flow caused a standstill and tension in the city.

Eyewitnesses said the rowdy protesters hit windshields of cars, and violently shoved aside two meida men – a photographer from the Chinese newspaper Guan Ming Daily and a videographer from a TV station.

At Komtar, the protesters chanted anti-state government and anti-Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng slogans.

They demanded Lim’s resignation as chief minister on grounds that he had openly thrown his support behind the Bersih 2.0 rally planned for July 9.

Scuffles broke out when police finally took action to disperse the crowd.

Police detained eight people, including Senator Ezam Mohd Nor and Mamak Association chief Mohamed Ghani Abdul Jiman, for allegedly taking part in an illegal assembly.

Police deployed some 100 officers and men to thwart the gathering.

After the arrests and after police sounded the siren for the protesters to disperse, they gathered along Jalan Penang, where several Umno leaders, including Ezam, gave anti-state government and anti-Lim speeches.

Ezam, who was former PKR Youth chief, warned Lim that there would be more such protests in the future to force him out of office before the next general election.

Another group of demonstrators marched from Jalan Penang to the Komtar area, carrying two ducks.

They called out Penang state executive councillor and Batu Maung assemblyman Abdul Malik Abul Kassim. The police just stood by and allowed the protesters to perform their antics.

After the protest, the demonstrators marched back to the mosque via Lebuh Carnavon.

Another group proceeded to Penang Bridge. They held a separate rally, carrying banners, waving the Malaysian flag and handing out flags to passers-by.

‘Most racist leader’

A journalist from Sin Chew Daily was hit on the back while the protesters warned him that they would throw him into the sea if he continued to snap their photos at close range.

The protest caused massive traffic jam on the bridge but policemen failed to take any action.

The demonstrators chanted “Guan Eng is a Communist” and claimed that he was the “most racist leader in the history of the country”.

They carried banners carrying messages such as “Bumiputeras are in the government and Chinese in opposition, is there any hope for the Penang Chinese?”

The protest today was similar to the one held on March 14, 2008, a week after Pakatan captured the state.

At a press conference later, chief police officer deputy commissioner Ayub Yaakob denied receiving any directive from Lim to round up and remand all the protesters.

“I did not receive any directive. Police can take action on their own to preserve peace and harmony,” he said.

Outside the police headquarters, Bayan Baru MP Zahrain Hashim insisted that Lim had issued such a directive to Ayub.

“I have information from my boys that Lim had issued such a directive. He is cruel.

“Why can’t he allow a peaceful demonstration against him?” asked Zahrain.

Also present were Umno divisional heads Ahmad Ibni Hajar (Tanjung) and Musa Syeikh Fadzir (Bukit Mertajam).

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New York City Street Execution – Caught on Video

A cold-blooded murder on a New York street was caught in graphic detail on a video from a nearby surveillance camera.

As Trevonne Winn collapses to the ground his attacker fires again, hitting him in the abdomen for a second time.

Trevonne Winn, 24, was gunned down as he stood outside his uncle’s fast food restaurant in Brooklyn. The video shows Mr Winn speaking into his mobile phone outside the Crown Fried Chicken shop when a black-clad man walks calmly over, pulls a pistol and shoots him twice.

SEE THE VIDEO HERE

As Mr Winn collapses and lies twitching on the ground, his attacker flees the scene and witnesses rush from local shops to see what is happening. Despite Mr Winn’s desperate efforts to get back on his feet, he is soon slumped on the pavement, immobile and apparently dying.

Soon a crowd surrounds the injured man as he lies bleeding to death on the pavement. Seemingly unsure of what to do, or perhaps frightened the gunman might return, bystanders look around warily for several minutes before one approaches Mr Winn to see if he is still alive.

  Shakeem Muhammad, a Flatbush resident who has since spoken to Mr Winn’s family, told NYDailyNews.com the shooting was probably a case of mistaken identity. ‘He probably looked like somebody who probably had some beef,’ he said. But Mr Muhammad added that he wasn’t surprised by the attack. 

‘I’ve seen just about everything that could happen in this community. I renamed this avenue here body-a-week avenue,’ he said. ‘I’ve been here since 1989. I think I’ve seen at least 15 murders on this block in that period of time. It’s a dangerous block.’ Mr Winn, of Jerome Street, was rushed to Kings County Hospital but later he died of his wounds. 

Police said he had a number of arrests in South Carolina. Mourners have set up a small candle vigil for Mr Winn on the spot where he was murdered. Police are asking witnesses or anyone with information to come forward.

  

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Crazed Naked Guy Terrorizes New York City Subway Passengers

A crazed naked man seen menacing New York City subway passengers on a scary new viral video was handcuffed and transported to a Bronx hospital last week, but not charged in connection with the bizarre incident, according to police.

Warning: The above video contains profanity and nudity and is NSFW.

After hurling himself into a set of doors, the man took off his boxer shorts, which elicited squeals from shocked observers. As a police officer was talking on his radio, the man bolted from the subway car and accosted a woman walking up a stairway. After slamming a package of hers to the ground, he lunged at a man walking perilously close to a platform edge.

With the help of some male onlookers, the cop succeeded in wrestling the man to the ground, where he was subdued. A police spokesman told TSG that the man, 41, was treated as an emotionally disturbed person and transported in custody to Lincoln Hospital for psychological evaluation.

The Transit District 12 officer with whom he grappled suffered a minor injury for which he was treated and released at Jacobi Hospital, the spokesman added.

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Mexican teens turn to kidnapping in drug war city

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO - School dropout Toby was just 15 when he and his friends started kidnapping businessmen, truck drivers and lawyers for ransom in Mexico's most violent city, Ciudad Juarez.

Now serving an eight-year sentence at a juvenile detention center, Toby looks anything but a gangster, with his slim build and neat hair. He has no tattoos or scars.

But as a worsening drug war hits the economy of this forlorn desert city, even teenagers from law-abiding families are being drawn into crime by the lure of cash and cool clothes.

"I started with armed robberies and the money was good. As my parents didn't have any work I thought, 'this is cool,' and I started kidnapping," said Toby, a Mexican-American born across the border in El Paso, Texas.

He says he made up to $45,000 a time with the abductions, and shared the loot with his friends.

His mother refused to take any of the money, so Toby, who moved to Ciudad Juarez with his parents when he was nine, frittered it away on clothes and cars. "I got through the money so fast so I just kept on doing it," he said.

Toby's father made a decent living for years in bars in Ciudad Juarez when Americans used to come over the border in droves for cheap tequila and a night on the town.

But a turf war between Mexico's most-wanted trafficker, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman and the powerful Juarez cartel has frightened off tourists, sparking a mindless spiral of killings that has laid waste to the manufacturing city and destroyed job prospects for the city's youth.

Some 230,000 people have fled Ciudad Juarez over the past two years.

Rubble lines the streets of the old center, just over the Rio Grande with the glass towers of El Paso in the distance. Day in, day out, authorities demolish the bars, hotels and brothels they say breed the drug crime terrorizing the city. But the violence continues.

"There's no way out and nothing to do, there aren't even parks to go to," said one teenager who declined to give his name in one of Ciudad Juarez's desolate 'barrios', crisscrossed with unpaved streets and sagging electricity cables.

No official data is available on minors staging kidnappings in Ciudad Juarez, but Eustacio Gutierrez, a judge dealing with local juvenile delinquents, said he hears cases daily.

Youngsters typically get hold of guns on the city's black market, start tracking wealthy residents and kidnap them.

"I've handed down sentences as long as 12 years," he said.

According to the girlfriend of a kidnapper who reported Toby and his friends to the police, the teens kept the victims locked up in a room in the house where one of them lived.

"They would choose victims themselves and pull people out of cars at gunpoint," the girl said, declining to be named.

While the 9,300 drug war dead in Ciudad Juarez since early 2008 has scared away U.S. teens from getting involved in smuggling drugs across the border, a lust for money and status is trumping fear for Mexican youngsters.

"All the businesses are shutting down, so what opportunities do young people have?" said Marc Marquez, deputy chief of juvenile services for El Paso County. "It is a vicious cycle. By the time they are 15, they are so desensitized."

EPHEMERAL WEALTH

Ciudad Juarez was once a kind of Las Vegas that boomed in the U.S. Prohibition era of the 1920s and early 1930s, luring American film stars and singers to its bars.

Named after Benito Juarez, a 19th-century reformist president, the city is scattered with monuments that recall the fighting during the Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920.

After the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, it was supposed to spearhead Mexico's march toward prosperity, attracting hundreds of thousands of workers from across the country and billions of dollars in foreign investment.

Foreign-owned plants remain busy and the Ciudad Juarez-El Paso region handled $71 billion in trade in 2010, but little of that wealth stays in Juarez. Factory jobs pay poorly, forcing parents to neglect their children as they toil just to get by.

President Felipe Calderon, who launched a crackdown on the drug cartels in late 2006, has pledged to build schools and parks to revive the city and end the violence. But locals say he is moving too slowly to deal with decades of neglect.

Poverty alone does not explain the teenage slide into crime, social workers say, noting that wealthier youngsters have also been caught kidnapping, tempted by easy money.

Juvenile detention centers once full of street gang members who barely got through primary school now deal with teenagers who went to private secondary schools, some of them girls.

"Something is very wrong," said Elizabeth Ochoa, a psychologist at one local detention center. "They want clothes and expensive cell phones, and all the police and all the prisons in the world are not going to stop them."

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