Mid-Week Post

Briefly....



He doesn't jail dissidents, idiota:

Pope Benedict and Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, both octogenarians, joked about their age in a brief meeting on Wednesday and then Castro popped the question: so what do you do?

The two world figures chatted for about 30 minutes at the Vatican embassy in Havana near the end of the pope's three-day visit to Cuba, where he called for greater freedom and a bigger role for the Catholic Church in the communist-led nation.

Parents in Saskatchewan complain that nothing is done about bullies:

A number of families in Central Butte, Sask., have taken their children out of the local school claiming not enough has been done to deal with bullying among students.

"I moved out of my Mom's house so I could get my education," Dakota Songer told CBC News about her families decision two years ago to have her attend school in Moose Jaw.

Songer, 18, explained she was a victim of bullying and, despite complaints and an informative talk by RCMP who visited the school, the behaviour did not end.

"I walked into class late one day and the students had put a picture of me up on the board and were defacing me in front of my whole entire class," Songer said, adding the teacher appeared to be condoning the activity. "My teacher was laughing along with them. And that was the last day I was at school."

An examination of the goings-on in Central Butte have revealed three other families with similar stories.

In the last few months the families have pulled nine youngsters out of the school. Six are being driven 40 kilometres every day to attend school in Chaplin.

The others are taking part in home schooling.

Bobby Torrie said her 13-year-old son, who has epilepsy was taunted and physically assaulted prior to them pulling him out of the school.

Torrie said when they took their concerns to officials at the school and the division, they were not taken seriously.

"We'd get answers like, 'We're dealing with these kids. We're talking to the kids,'" Torrie said. "But they're not. I don't see it."

This is how you handle bullies:








This should be required reading:

"Escape From Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey From North Korea to Freedom in the West" (Viking), by Blaine Harden: Hitler's death camps, Stalin's gulag and Pol Pot's killing fields are now the stuff of history, but the unspeakable horrors they evoke still endure in the labour camps of North Korea.

However, the veil of secrecy that has kept the camps off the world's radar screen may now be less opaque thanks to the courage of a young man who was born in the harshest of those prisons and at age 23 miraculously escaped and made his way to the West.

Shin Dong-hyuk's story, told by veteran journalist Blaine Harden, details how Shin was bred by camp guards who selected his mother and father. Shin was tortured and starved, taught to inform on family members and classmates, and forced to watch the public execution of his mother and older brother.

Shin learned during an interrogation that his father was imprisoned because two of his 11 brothers had fled to the South during the Korean War. Shin had to remain in captivity because his father's sins against the state had left him with tainted blood.

He had no knowledge of the world outside Camp 14, a 108-square-mile compound encircled by electrified barbed wire that became home to up to 50,000 prisoners who worked long hours in mines, farms and factories.

Prisoners were consigned to lives of squalor while subsisting on meagre portions of corn and cabbage. The rules were strict, and violators faced swift punishment. Shin said he felt no anger as he watched his teacher beat a 6-year-old classmate to death after he found five kernels of corn hidden in her pocket. Shin, ever passive, thought her punishment was just and fair.

His thoughts turned to escape only after he met an older prisoner who had travelled outside Korea and described to him a world of computers and mobile phones. Faced with constant hunger, Shin was more interested in his friend's stories about food. "Freedom, in Shin's mind, was just another word for grilled meat."

Shin suffered severe burns as he slipped through the fence. He then found himself with no coat in the brutally cold Korean winter and no idea how to make his way to China and freedom. But even as his odyssey took him from there to South Korea and eventually to the U.S., where he decided to work as a human rights activist for North Korean prisoners, his adjustment to a new life posed severe emotional challenges.

"I am evolving from being an animal," he told Harden. "Sometimes I try to cry and laugh like other people, just to see if it feels like anything. Yet, tears don't come. Laughter doesn't come."

Related: children in North Korea are malnourished yet the state still finds enough money to glorify fat dead b@$t@rd Kim Jong-Il.




And now, proof that dogs just need someone to love to make them happy, no matter how hard a life they've had.