The California Department of Motor Vehicles has recalled a vanity license plate that reads "NOT SEE" after the school bus driver who ordered it turned out to be a Nazi.
Joerg Haider, the extreme right wing Austrian politician who once said the Nazis had "an orderly employment policy" and referred to the concentration camps as "the punishment camps of National Socialism," died in a car crash last night. He was 58. "Haider was pronounced dead in a hospital shortly after his Volkswagen Phaeton veered off the road outside Klagenfurt in southern Austria and overturned several times after he successfully passed another car, police said. Authorities said an initial investigation showed no signs of foul play. At the time of his death, Haider was governor of the province of Carinthia and leader of the Alliance for the Future of Austria—a party he formed after breaking away from the far right Freedom Party in 2005." Haider always denied having a soft spot for the Third Reich and its Neo-Nazi spawn, but when he got into national government with 27 percent of the vote on an anti-immigration platform in 1999, the rest of Europe rewarded Austria with months of EU sanctions over Haider's statements—seen by less Alpine nations as anti-Semitic and pro-Hitler. Strangely, Israel's relations with Austria suffered after Haider's election, and the Israeli ambassador was pulled from Vienna. Though Haider and his gang left the Freedom Party for the gentler Alliance for the Future of Australia in 2005, Haider met with the Freedom Party's leader last month when they realized their combined votes in the last national election were nearly equal to that of the winning Social Democrats. Said Freedom Party boss Heinz-Christian Strache, "Joerg Haider achieved great things ... he was a great figure." [AP]
Since 2003, former child star Haley Joel Osment has done most of his acting off-camera, occasionally content to add the occasional videogame voice-over or alcohol-addled car accident to his resume. Recently, though, Osment has reappeared in the public eye, preparing for his Broadway (and cuss word) debut with a vigor that would put even Dakota Fanning 2.0 to shame. Now, Osment shares with MTV the next phase of his career comeback, and it involves the Hitler Youth:
Earlier this month we wrote about how New York socialite Emilia Fanjul (pictured) hired as an executive assistant and charter-school press contact one Chloe Black, who marries and otherwise travels in white supremacist circles. The story was picked up by the Post and down in Palm Beach, and boy did the shit hit the fan! Among neo-Nazis, that is. Chloe Black, you see, told the Palm Beach paper, "I... do not agree with extremist or racially prejudiced views," even though she was once vice president of the Louisiana KKK and has attended a variety of white supremacist conferences recently, including one in Alabama in June. Perhaps she was trying to appease her boss Fanjul, who according to a Post source did not know about Black's history and who, as of July 18, has not fired her. In any case, commenters in racist Web forums — like the one run by Black's current husband! — are enraged at Black's professed non-bigotry, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports. A sampling:
Ok guys, deep breaths. Do you know the Fanjuls? Pepe and his lovely wife Emilia? They're maybe the wealthiest Cuban-American couple in the nation. Emilia, a socialite about Palm Beach, the Dominican Republic, and, yes, New York, is famous for her charitable work. Recently she's made a couple headlines for her newest project—"helping to finance and build a sparkling new campus for Glades Academy, a charter school in the town of Pahokee, Fla.," a town full of impoverished migrant workers and their families. So it's odd, isn't it, that her "executive assistant" and publicist is a white supremacist.
