Seventy members of an Islamist sect in Russia have been found living in an underground bunker without heat or sunlight on the outskirts of the city of Kazan, according to Russian media.

The sect members – including 20 children, the youngest of whom was 18 months old – are thought to have been underground for nearly a decade.

Many of the children were born underground and had never seen daylight until the prosecutors discovered them on 1 August. After health checks, a 17-year-old girl turned out to be pregnant.


The group, known as the Fayzarahmanist sect, was named after its 83-year-old organiser Fayzrahman Satarov, who declared himself a prophet and his house an independent Islamic state, according to a report by state TV channel Vesti.

Yet the rapid learning curve since the massacre delivered up the unexpected. Some at the vigil were struck by the Sikh community's willingness to forgive the man who committed murder in their temple, who was himself shot dead by the police, and to emphasise peace over vengeance. The town's police chief, John Edwards, was among them.

"In 28 years of law enforcement, I have seen a lot of hate. I have seen a lot of revenge. I've seen a lot of anger. What I saw, particularly from the Sikh community this week was compassion, concern, support," he told the vigil standing in front a row of people holding signs that spelled out: practice peace. "What I didn't see was hate. I did not see revenge. I didn't see any of that. And in law enforcement that's unusual to not see that reaction to something like this. I want you all to understand how unique that is."

Pelzek said that in a country so often unforgiving and vengeful it was startling to see the Sikh response to the tragedy. "It surprised everyone when they were victims of someone so full of hatred. Because of their reaction, saying they'd like to forgive and move on, I think that's quite the attitude to hear after what just happened," she said.

The lesson, spelled out by Oak Creek's mayor, Steve Saffidi, was that it shouldn't have taken a tragedy for Sikhs, or anyone else, to find acceptance.

As for what pundits say is Romney's difficulty connecting with people, Emmett blames it largely on what she calls “the entitled Mormon male syndrome, where the leadership professes compassion and concern but leaves the manifestations of that to the drones. All male leadership is not this way; there are some wonderful men who do their best to exercise their power compassionately, but many do not.”

Emmett says Romney was a bishop, “a position where everyone defers to you. What a bishop says goes. People come to them to receive blessings.” He then became a stake president, she says, which means he presided over several congregations, and at that point bishops deferred to him.

“Mitt has had people defer to him and not challenge him his entire life,” says Emmett. “In the Mormon church if you challenge your priesthood leaders it’s a very bad thing to do, especially for women. As the world can now see, Mitt has a very hard time with being questioned and criticized; he’s had so little of this in his life."

The reason that the Reagan/Clinton/Bush era has seen the steady erosion and eclipse of our middle class is simply attributable to this coincidence of political and economic enclosure. The modern enclosure movement echoes that of pre-industrial Britain. A segment of society sees benefit in the execution of new ideas and techniques and seeks to extract value from them. In order to do this they have to re-arrange society. They need to dispense with prior existing social contracts and establish new ones that give them leeway to effect the value creating change. They need to co-opt the political process in order to write the laws needed. They need to alter inhibiting social norms. They need to entrench themselves so as to extract what they can. And they need to divert the dispossessed into different and more malleable channels of subsistence.

In our case the new technology or set of ideas that undergirds the modern enclosure movement is that of economics. Particularly neoclassical economics. Whether we like it of not modern America is increasingly being re-shaped to conform with the notions of society that form the basis of that theory. Variants of it infest modern business management theory; they underpin the explosion in the share of our economy diverted into finance; they inform the media’s attitude towards policy; they form the basis of common discussion about the economy; and they provide an intellectual backdrop for the dominance of post-Reagan right wing political positions. There has been no effective reaction from the left over the past four decades because its elite too has been captured.

There may have been a time in the not-too-distant past when politicians would have felt a bit embarrassed about accusing their colleagues of intentionally scuttling the country’s future for their own short-term gain. That time seems to be long gone. Talk about questioning someone’s patriotism.

Now we add to this the claim that Romney is seeking to raise taxes on the working class to enrich the rich. That’s even more heinous.

None of this is about policy. A policy debate might center on whether Romney’s tax-cut plan would work or not. This is a character assault on the red team. The message from the president is that Romney doesn’t mind hurting the poor to make the rich richer.

Romney is trying to build some credibility on middle-class issues, but a sustained character assault such as this could make that very hard.

More than 80 lawyers have signed an open letter to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney challenging his insistence he played no role in granting Conrad Black a permit to live in this country even before the U.K. citizen had finished his jail time in Florida.

The lawyers, all immigration specialists, say they believe Mr. Kenney must have had some part in the controversial decision to grant a temporary resident permit to Mr. Black, who renounced his Canadian citizenship in pursuit of a British peerage and had served time in a Florida jail for fraud and obstruction of justice.

They are also daring the Harper government minister to haul them before the Law Society of Upper Canada for saying so.

The lawyers banded together in defence of Toronto colleague Guidy Mamann, whom Mr. Kenney’s office tried to have censured after he told journalists that he found it improbable that such a major decision was made without the minister’s input.

Gingrich said Romney should have double-downed on the remarks.

“I wish that the elites of this country had the courage to look at the United Nations refugee camps and realize what an anti-human disaster those refuge camps are, how much they have been breeders of terrorism, how fundamentally wrong their design is and how much we’ve done a disservice to… the Palestinians by allowing them to be subjected to that kind of government run, totally inappropriate structure,” he said.

“I hope that Governor Romney will stick to his guns. Let’s have the argument.”

Whether or not Gingrich’s comments were well-intended, it’s likely they were unwelcome to the Romney campaign as they attempt to put the gaffe-prone overseas tour of the U.K., Israel and Poland behind them.

Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney hailed Poland's economy Tuesday as something akin to a Republican dream: a place of small government, individual empowerment and free enterprise.

While it's true that Poland is one of Europe's fastest-growing economies and boasts dynamic entrepreneurs, Romney's depiction of Poland as a place of small government is debatable. Even 23 years after throwing off a communist command economy, the Polish government continues to have a strong presence in people's lives: it gives women $300 for each baby they have, doubling that sum for poor families; it fully funds state university educations; and it guarantees health care to all its 38 million citizens.

And while Poland's economic growth has certainly been impressive in recent years, this is partly the result of economic redistribution in the form of subsidies that have been flowing in from the European Union since it joined the bloc in 2004.

This Wednesday, at the urging of former U.S. presidential wannabe/Fox News gabber Mike Huckabee, people who don’t like homosexuals will gorge themselves on chicken at a previously mostly unheard of fast food chain. They will photograph and Tweet themselves – as former wannabe vice president Sarah Palin did this past weekend – gleefully celebrating their intolerance.

No doubt Palin was taking a break from looking after her illegitimate grandson while his teenage mother continues her relentless pursuit of a career in reality television. That’s the American right wing’s version of family values.

It’s worth noting that Cathy isn’t spending his money offering counselling to straight couples in trouble. He isn’t fighting spousal abuse or underwriting campaigns to reduce the incidence of single motherhood. His millions are pledged to a deliberate effort to deny basic legal rights to dedicated and loving couples and their children. That makes him a promoter of intolerance and an enabler of hatred.

Those who make a pilgrimage to Chick fil-A outlets in the U.S. on Wednesday share common ground with the men and women who heckled the Little Rock Nine or those who poured sugar over the heads of whites and blacks who dared sit together at a Woolworths counter. Twenty years from now will they flush with the shame that most surviving segregationists now feel when they reflect on their actions and thoughts in the 1950s and 60s?