Free Republic

Dressed in their finest clothes and gold jewellery, thousands of teenage Roma girls were paraded around by their parents this weekend - at an open-air brides market. Wearing lots of make-up, the teenagers came to the traditional annual market in Bulgaria, hoping to find a husband - and preferably one willing to pay a large amount of money for his future spouse. 'We take our daughters to this gathering so they could get acquainted with boys, for we do not allow our children to go to discos,' explains Elena from Kapitan Andreevo. At the market in the village of Mogila...

First he encircled them with an 8ft metal fence. And when that failed to move the gipsy camp off his land, he dug a moat. Builder Francis Shiner resorted to the measures when two gipsy families set up home on the disused car park of a building site in Bedford.He asked them to move but they didn't. So he went on the offensive and managed to evict them within 48 hours. Mr Shiner said the gipsies were hindering work on the site owned by Bedford construction company SDC construction and action had to be taken. He said: 'We went...

"Holocaust against the Roma" exhibition in Warsaw 06.11.2006 The exhibition is very well documented- the exhibits: photographs, documents, identity cards come from several dozen institutions as well as private persons who are involved in the project. The genocide committed by Nazi Germany on the Roma community is largely forgotten in many European countries. This ignorance makes the long born stereotypes about the Roma community very much alive . The exhibition is composed of four parts which demonstrate the growth of the racial policy towards the Roma from the early persecution and isolation to mass extermination says the commissioner of the...

Romanticized and persecuted, celebrated and shunned, Gypsies have become a growing presence in the world music circuit since the fall of Communism -- yet the everyday prejudice they face across Europe has persisted, and sometimes worsened. Even the word "Gypsy" is a misunderstanding, based on the notion that they are descended from Egyptians, though their ancestors actually migrated in the 11th century from Rajasthan in northwestern India. In recent years, the name they call themselves in the Romani language, Roma, has been increasingly embraced. By the 15th century, there were Roma communities in Eastern Europe, as well as the Iberian...

White House gates shut to 'Kazakh reporter' comic Fri Sep 29, 2006 8:46am ET Borat goes to Washington:PLAY VIDEOBy Andy Sullivan WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Borat, the fictional TV reporter from Kazakhstan, may have gotten under the skin of Kazakh officials but on Thursday he couldn't get past the gates of the White House. Secret Service agents turned away British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the boorish, anti-Semitic journalist, when he tried to invite "Premier George Walter Bush" to a screening of his upcoming movie, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan." Also invited...

For a long time the proponents of Kosovo’s independence have acted as if the game was up, that all that remained was for the “international community” to settle on the formula for independence—and for Serbia to sign on the dotted line under pressure. Until recently, many old Balkan hands in the world’s capitals that matter expected that by the end of 2006 it would be all over. There are recent signs, however, that “it” won’t be over that soon, and that the outcome is by no means preordained. It did not look that way when the United Nations abandoned its...

Uncovering the Past by Maria Husova 30 January 2006 World War II ended more than 60 years ago, but the Roma Holocaust in Slovakia is only now being recognized. Tens of thousands of Roma in Europe were among the victims of the Holocaust, but many Slovaks still don’t know that people other than Jews were victims of persecution during World War II. Only recently, moving stories of Roma survivors have begun to emerge. Those survivors are finally seeing their pain acknowledged in memorials, and some have even received compensation. The Roma Holocaust is called Baro Porrajmos in the Roma language,...

A travellers’ website tells gipsies how to use the Human Rights Act to abuse planning laws, The Sun can reveal. Friends, Families & Travellers boasts a DIY page which tells them how they can flout the law. It actively encourages travellers to take over sites with no planning permission. And it tells them how they can use the Human Rights Act to get round the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. Details of the website come as petitions pour in from thousands of Sun readers angry at Deputy PM John Prescott over lax laws which allow gipsies to bypass...

Illegal traveller camps and squatters will escape eviction for months to come while judges decide if moving them on will breach their human rights. The length of the delay became clear yesterday in the case of the Maloney family, who have been evicted more than 50 times and cost the taxpayer an estimated £300,000. The Court of Appeal ruled that their local council was right to throw the Gyspy family off public playing fields, but then took the unusual step of sending the case to the House of Lords for a final decision. In a groundbreaking case, five members of...

Presidential Candidate Has Experienced Financial Scrapes, Transient Lifestyle WASHINGTON -- John Kerry is often attacked by political opponents for being a wealthy, out-of-touch elitist. But while he is quite wealthy, and has never been without at least a comfortable income and lifestyle, the presumptive Democratic nominee has experienced broader swings between the high life and pedestrian money concerns than the caricature suggests. Indeed, from about 1984 through 1995, in between his marriages to two wealthy women and during his first years in the Senate, the father of two stretched dollars from paycheck to paycheck and borrowed money to cover tuition...

In the midst of a recent Cher concert at a packed arena in Washington, D.C., massive TV screens flashed a clip of the star declaring that if she wanted to take a certain pair of body parts from her chest and implant them in her back it would be nobody's business but her own. Cher's anatomy, of course, sports no such anomalies. Quite the contrary: The star on stage that night had everything in the right place. If anything, she resembled one of those cookie-cutter female characters in a contemporary Disney animation. Slap a red wig and fish tail on...

SIBIU, Romania - It was billed as the Gypsy wedding of the year. But the ceremony, launching a three-day party, got off to a bad start: The 12-year-old "princess bride" — daughter of a self-proclaimed king — stormed out of the church in protest in front of 400 guests. "Leave me alone!" Ana Maria Cioaba screamed at reporters Saturday, swearing at them as she sought shelter in a nearby house. Her bridesmaids chanted slogans against the groom. She returned to the church minutes later and — though she would hardly look at him — was duly married off to her...

DALLAS (AP) _ The tearful testimonial Madelyne Gorman Toogood gave in front of glaring TV cameras after she was videotaped beating her daughter was starkly uncharacteristic of the reclusive, media-shy Irish Travelers culture to which she belongs, experts say. Toogood, who was caught beating her 4-year-old daughter, Martha, in a department store parking lot, said she is a member of the clannish, nomadic culture of Irish descendants, most of whom came to the United States as refugees during the potato famine in the 1840s. ``By nature, they're very reclusive people,'' said Joe Livingston, a South Carolina state investigator who has...