Culture

The Dutch Grapple with Intolerance / Race, religion spur immigration debate

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By Jennifer Hamm
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — After a 19-year-old man of Moroccan descent was run down and killed by a Dutch woman driver trying to recover her stolen purse, mourners blamed Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk for the death. Gathered at a makeshift memorial here earlier this winter, the mourners said Verdonk’s tough immigration reforms have increased Dutch xenophobia against Muslims, spurring the woman’s violent reaction against the alleged purse thief. Though the Dutch are famous for allowing euthanasia, gay marriage and soft-drug use, it is ironically their tolerance that may have laid the foundation for current ethnic tensions. “The problem is we have been tolerant of the intolerant and now we are paying the bill,” said Bart Jan Spruyt, director of the conservative Edmund Burke Foundation in The Hague. “That bill has to be settled first before we can become tolerant again.”

Culture

For Blacks, Breast Cancer is a Plague of Neglect

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• Part One: Cause & Controversy
• Part Two: A Plague of Neglect
• Sidebars: Risk Factors; Toxic Links; Long Island
• Printable: Download the magazine-style PDF

By Carl Hall, special to Newsdesk.org

Dr. Judith Luce, head of the community breast cancer treatment center at San Francisco General Hospital, took a rare break one recent spring day from one of the busiest caseloads in Bay Area health care. She spent a full hour outlining what she considers to be the real Bay Area cancer nightmare. It’s not about Marin, Luce said, it’s about women in areas such as predominantly African-American, low-income Bayview/Hunters Point (Yahoo map) in San Francisco. The San Francisco neighborhood is perhaps best known for the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, where residents suspect decades of miscellaneous dumping of cleaning chemicals, industrial solvents and other toxins nobody has fully cataloged. Cancer Cluster?