World News Thread

[Túrin Turambar]

The big UK news this week is that Dominic Cummings, former Chief Advisor to Boris Johnson, has expressed some...forceful opinions on the Government's handling of the pandemic.

[Frelga]

Belarus: Russia blocks some flights for avoiding its ally

Air France and Austrian Airlines have both had to cancel services after their flight plans were rejected by Russia.

[Sunsilver]

I hardly know where to start in talking about this.

Canadians have know for years that the residential schools native children were forced to attend, beginning in 1884, were horrible places.

Now, a survey done at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., has uncovered 215 undocumented graves of native children.

If this comes as a surprise to anyone, well, they haven't been listening very carefully. This is JUST the tip of the iceberg.

It didn't take much digging for me to uncover the history behind this horror story. Over a hundred years ago, Dr. Peter Bryce was given responsibility for overseeing the health of the children attending (incarcerated would actually be a more accurate word) these schools.

He found out approximately 25% of the children died from tuberculosis. The death rate for ex-students he managed to track down was 69%.

When he went to the government with his findings, he was ignored. Totally ignored.

Bryce’s report named poor ventilation and poor standards of care from school officials as the primary cause of deaths as opposed to the racial susceptibility hypothesis rather popular at the time. Put simply, Bryce “exposed the genocidal practices of government-sanctioned residential schools, where healthy Indigenous children were purposefully exposed to children infected with TB, spreading the disease through the school population.”

When Duncan Campbell Scott became Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs in 1913, he did everything possible to silence Bryce, and cut his funding.

Not the type to be silenced, Bryce arranged for a publisher (James Hope and Sons Limited) to print a short pamphlet that was sold for 35 cents a copy. It was titled The Story of a National Crime and it detailed the struggles of a medical officer hamstrung by a draconian Duncan Campbell Scott. In the pamphlet, Bryce included passages from departmental letters he had written during his tenure as the Chief Medical Officer.

I've known about the abuses of these school since they first began to come to light about 30 years ago, but I did not know about Bryce's efforts to expose them over a hundred years ago. This bit of history has been carefully buried, like Bryce's reports.

In 2019, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal found the government guilty of severe neglect and what they termed 'willful' and 'reckless' discrimination with regards to the students at these schools, and said the government should give the surviving students $40,000 in compensation.

In October of 2020, Prime Minister Trudeau announced his decision to appeal the tribunal's findings.

The government previously agreed to a $1.9 billion compensation package for surviving students, back in 2007, and most of this money has already been distributed. I need to dig into this a bit more to find if this is his reason for vetoing the tribunal's decision.

It will take generations to undo the damage done by the schools, if it is even possible. I would certainly like to see the government doing more to help the indigenous people, many of whom don't even have clean drinking water or decent housing.

https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/9/E223? ... pvHTE0cUdY

[Sunsilver]

Link to the news story about the graves in Kamloops: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british- ... -1.6043778

In addition to the school's neglect of the students' health, and allowing T.B. to spread unchecked, many students were also physically and sexually abused. This certainly might have caused some of the deaths.

And here's the little detail that should have everyone calling - no, make that SCREAMING for an investigation:

According to Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, director of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was set up in 2008 to find out what happened in residential schools was told 50 deaths occurred at the Kamloops institution.

She said "massive ongoing problems" with historical records, including those "held by certain Catholic entities that they will not release" have made it very hard to understand accurately what happened.

So, 200 undocumented deaths? I think the grounds of every former residential school needs to be probed for similar unmarked graves!

[Sunsilver]

More about deaths in the residential schools:

Meanwhile the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has created a memorial register of the more than 3,200 children who died at residential schools https://nctr.ca/memorial/, and the number continues to grow as records are located and due to access to technology. According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, child abuse was institutionalized and normalized at residential schools, and many children were starved and experimented on.

https://scoinc.mb.ca/sco-responds-to-di ... -qnpkO4dw4

[Inanna]

Oh my god.

[Frelga]

Similar accusations, including first-hand accounts, are being made about about catholic orphanages for Native children on reservations in the US.

[Sunsilver]

Dear God...I never knew that!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Meanwhile, it looks like Netanyahu is finally done. It is taking a bizarre coalition of hard-right, left-wing, centrists, ultra-Orthodox and Arab-Israeli parties.

Israel inches closer to government without Netanyahu

[River]

Meanwhile, it looks like Netanyahu is finally done. It is taking a bizarre coalition of hard-right, left-wing, centrists, ultra-Orthodox and Arab-Israeli parties.

Israel inches closer to government without Netanyahu

Wow. I've been feeling rather bad for the Israeli people. They've clearly been trying to shake him off (he' been indicted, for pete's sake) but he's like a wicked little cold virus that won't let go. But maybe now they're making some headway.

[Frelga]

Yes, the latest shootout with Hamas was pretty blatantly his last-ditch attempt to hold on to power. Lives lost, for this.

The coalition seems too volatile to last. Maybe they will learn to compromise. Maybe pigs will learn to fly.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I think pigs learning to fly is a heck of lot more likely.

[Sunsilver]

Link to the news story about the graves in Kamloops: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british- ... -1.6043778
And here's the little detail that should have everyone calling - no, make that SCREAMING for an investigation:

According to Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, director of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was set up in 2008 to find out what happened in residential schools was told 50 deaths occurred at the Kamloops institution.

She said "massive ongoing problems" with historical records, including those "held by certain Catholic entities that they will not release" have made it very hard to understand accurately what happened.

So, 200 undocumented deaths? I think the grounds of every former residential school needs to be probed for similar unmarked graves!

Okay, my math was a bit off yesterday. But it would not surprise me that my numbers are closer to the truth than what the Catholic Church claims!

[RoseMorninStar]

Unfortunately, there have been such cases in Ireland, the US, and probably elsewhere. It's a tragedy. Worse, a horror.

[N.E. Brigand]

I didn't realize that "Burma" and "Myanmar" derive from the same word. Also "Myanmar" should be pronounced with two syllables not three, and the R is silent. Nice little linguistics lesson.

And it definitely shouldn't be pronounced "minimar".

[N.E. Brigand]

CNN: Belarus activist arrested after fighter jet intercepts his Ryanair flight

This regularly scheduled commercial flight on an Irish airliner originated in Athens, Greece and was bound for Vilnius, Lithuania. The latter country borders Belarus, and this route overflies that nation (it also overflies Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, and perhaps a little bit of Poland). It's not clear why the plane landed. That CNN report cites differing stories about either a bomb threat or a dispute among the passengers. Given the outcome, there should be an examination into whether the reason was pretextual.

The activist, Roman Protasevich, has been living in exile in Lithuania. He may face the death penalty in Belarus. That government's dictatorial president, Alexander Lukashenko, has previously had Protasevich identified a terrorist.

In what I assume was an appearance following a few rounds of torture and with the hope of avoiding execution, Protasevich yesterday on Belarusian state television offered words of praise for Lukashenko.

Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero! --- No. Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.

[N.E. Brigand]

Meanwhile, it looks like Netanyahu is finally done. It is taking a bizarre coalition of hard-right, left-wing, centrists, ultra-Orthodox and Arab-Israeli parties.

Israel inches closer to government without Netanyahu

Wow. I've been feeling rather bad for the Israeli people. They've clearly been trying to shake him off (he' been indicted, for pete's sake) but he's like a wicked little cold virus that won't let go. But maybe now they're making some headway.

And it's done. Naftali Bennett is Israel's Prime Minister.

Although apparently Benjamin Netanyahu has asked Bennett to be allowed six weeks to move out of the Prime Minister's residence. Edit: But that may not be so unusual. I saw a report that it took Ehud Barak six weeks to move out in 2001 after losing to Ariel Sharon.

[Túrin Turambar]

Practically, what difference will this make to Israeli foriegn policy? Ideologically, Bennett seems to me to be pretty similar to Netanyahu (although I know virtually nothing about him).

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Ideologically, Bennett is to the right of Netanyahu. However, his main partner in the coalition, Lapid, is considerably to the left of Netanyahu, and will be Foreign Minister for the first two years of the four year term, and then become PM. It remains to be seen how much power Bennett (whose party only won 7 seats in the Knesset, versus 17 for Lapid's party, and 30 for Netanyahu's party), will have to determine policy. It seems impossible for the ruling coalition which contains Orthodox Jewish party and for the first time ever, an Arab party. My guess is that they will shy away from addressing foreign policy issues and concentrate on domestic issues, though it seems just as unlikely to be able to reach agreement there as well. My guess is that the coalition will collapse before Lapid becomes PM.

[Frelga]

I'm sure it will all be routine and dull.