Mid-Week Post

The intermission of the work-week...


Virtually fresh from a devastating earthquake,  Nepal experiences another one:

A second powerful earthquake in less than three weeks spread panic in Nepal on Tuesday, bringing down buildings weakened by the first disaster and killing at least 66 people, including 17 in neighbouring India and one in Chinese Tibet.

Most of the reported fatalities were in villages and towns east of Kathmandu, only just beginning to pick up the pieces from the April 25 quake that left more than 8,000 dead.

Also:

  

So, what happens when disaster strikes? Who is responsible for getting them home?

A new poll says more than half of Canadians believe the federal government has all or most of the responsibility for getting citizens out of a disaster zone.

But 38 per cent – almost one in five – felt the rescued should have to pay a portion of the cost, says a report by the Angus Reid Institute.

And only 16 per cent of survey respondents felt government is responsible for helping Canadians who have travelled to countries considered high-risk.

 
Who should pay? Perhaps the people who went to global hotbeds of civil unrest and/or natural disasters? The government- funded by the people of Canada- should not responsible for ferrying people to and fro whenever things hit the fan.



It turns out that a publicly-funded Amtrak train in Pennsylvania crashed because it was going too fast on aging infrastructure:

Using its verified Twitter account, the National Transportation Safety Board reported Wednesday afternoon that the Amtrak train that derailed Tuesday night in Philadelphia was moving at 100 miles per hour just prior to the derailment and crash that killed 7 and injured more than 200.

Two charges of sexual assault have been dropped against disgraced CBC personality Jian Ghomeshi:

Two sexual assault charges have been dropped against disgraced former broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi, who was ordered Tuesday to face the remaining five charges of sexual assault and one count of choking in two separate trials.

The former host of CBC Radio's cultural affairs show "Q" was originally charged with seven counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by choking.

Crown prosecutor Mike Callaghan said Tuesday that two sexual assault charges were being withdrawn because there was no reasonable prospect of conviction.

But Palestine isn't a state!

The Holy See and the State of Palestine have agreed on the text of a treaty regarding the life and activity of the Church in Palestine, which is expected to be signed soon by both parties.

(sigh)

These are the same people who used the Church of the Nativity as a toilet. There will be no respect for Christians or anyone else in that Jordanian colony.

And to remind one of what is at stake:

Having lost their homes, their heritage and their sense of dignity, Iraqi Christians victimized by the Islamic State feel abandoned by earthly powers, but their faith in God has only grown, an Iraqi nun told members of Congress May 13.

The faith of homeless Iraqi Christians is “increasing more and more,” Sister Diana Momeka, O.P., told the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Many of the displaced lived in devastating conditions – families taking shelter in containers, parents without jobs and children without an education.

But Sister Diana insisted the spirit of the people has not been broken by the adversity.

“It's making us stronger,” she said.

“We were displaced, yet we feel that the hand of God is still with us…In the midst of this darkness, this suffering, we see that God is holding us,” she explained, adding that it is a “gift of the Holy Spirit” to be able to stay and have faith through hardship.

Sister Diana was part of the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena, originally from Mosul in Northern Iraq. Islamist militants bombed their convent in 2009, and after the prioress sought protection from the local government and found none, Sister Diana and the community moved to Qaraqosh.

The ISIS onslaught caught up to them last summer. As the Islamic State swept through parts of Iraq and Syria, establishing a strict caliphate, more than 120,000 Iraqis were displaced on the Nineveh Plain, faced with the decision to convert to Islam, stay and pay a jizya tax to ISIS, or leave immediately.

The religious community moved again, this time to Kurdistan. “We were driven out of our homes in a couple of hours,” the nun described, “without any warning.”

Almost no Christians are left in Mosul, Sister Diana said, except for about 100 Christian hostages of ISIS.

Slated to testify before a congressional committee as part of an Iraqi delegation, Sister Diana’s application for a visa was initially denied by the local U.S. Consulate because of her status as an internally-displaced person.

Amid mounting pressure, she was later able to enter the United States and testified before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee May 13 regarding “ISIS's war on religious minorities.”

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un reportedly had his own aunt poisoned and executed his chief of the armed forces by shooting him to pieces:

Hyon Yong-chol, the chief of North Korea’s People’s Armed Forces, was executed by firing squad using an anti-aircraft gun at a military school in Pyongyang around April 30, the National Intelligence Service said. …

Hyon was named as the armed forces chief in June 2014, the No. 2 man within the North’s military after Hwang pyong-so, director of the general political department of the Korean People’s Army (KPA). North Korea has not announced its purge of Hyon yet.

The NIS said that given available information, Hyon seemed to be purged not because he sought a rebellion but because he was “disrespectful” to the young leader.

Once the North Korean military leadership gets over this, Kim Jong-Un is up for an assassination.

(Kamsahamnida)


Wasn't I saying this?

Home Secretary Theresa May has suggested three British schoolgirls believed to have escaped the clutches of ISIS may not be allowed back into the UK even if they manage to return.

Reports from Iraq suggest three teenagers who had been married off to ISIS fighters have now gone on the run near the city of Mosul.

It has been suggested the trio may be Shamima Begum, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana, who disappeared from their homes in east London earlier this year.

The newly-reappointed Mrs May today declined to say whether the girls would be allowed back into Britain even if they managed to escape the war-torn region.

 
Leave. Them. There.


Good:

Anti-abortion activists are hitting the pavement to spread a very graphic and political pro-life message targeting Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.

Flyers showing Trudeau next to a graphic image of an aborted fetus are being spread around the GTA and across Canada.

 
(Sidebar: note that the wags have Mohammaded the image.)

I hope it is humiliating for the Boy Wonder. Like his father before him, Trudeau doesn't just support abortion, he enforces the belief in it in his own party.

And let's not forget what goes on in the "basic dictatorship" of China and its buffer-state, North Korea:

According to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China report, released on October 10, 2010, violators of China’s One Child Policy continue to be victims of “forced sterilization, forced abortion, arbitrary detention, and other abuses.”   

**

North Korea forces women to undergo abortions and young mothers to drown their newborn babies, and has starved and executed hundreds of thousands of detainees at secret prison camps — atrocities that the chairman of a U.N. panel that documented the abuses compares to those of Nazi Germany.

 
And now, even though his life was drastically short, his existence was miraculous:

His life was brief. Only 80 short minutes. There was nothing we could do to save him. No procedures could fix the missing parts of his skull or brain (a condition known as anencephaly). We could only love him, celebrate his existence, and embrace the time we had with him.

We did everything we could to make the most of his life, but since we could not prevent his death, we wanted to embrace that as well. To do this, we chose to allow our son to give back by participating in organ, tissue and whole body donation.