Mid-Week Post

Nine more days until Christmas...


Lim Hyeon-Soo, a pastor from Toronto, has been given a life sentence in North Korea:

Hyeon Soo Lim, who pastors the Light Korean Presbyterian Church in Toronto, was given the sentence after a 90-minute trial. He had been in detention since February.

Lim entered and left the court in handcuffs flanked by two public security officers in uniform. The handcuffs were removed in court during the trial. He kept his head bowed most of the time and answered questions in a subdued tone.

The crimes he was charged with included harming the dignity of the supreme leadership, trying to use religion to destroy the North Korean system, disseminating negative propaganda about the North to the overseas Koreans, and helping U.S. and the South Korean authorities lure and abduct North Korean citizens, along with aiding their programs to assist defectors from the North.

State prosecutors sought the death penalty.

Lim's lawyer asked the court to take into account the fact that Lim is a fellow Korean and that he had frankly confessed to everything the prosecution had brought up. Lim pleaded to be given a chance and said if the court gave him a chance he would not do anything bad again.

Lim had earlier appeared at a news conference organized by North Korean authorities in Pyongyang in July and admitted to plotting to overthrow the North Korean state, but other foreigners detained in North Korea and then released have said they were coerced into making similar statements and confessing guilt during their detention.

Lim's relatives and colleagues have said he travelled on Jan. 31 as part of a regular humanitarian mission to North Korea where he supports a nursing home, a nursery and an orphanage. They said Lim, who is in his early 60s, has made more than 100 trips to North Korea since 1997 and that his trips were about helping people and were not political.

(Sidebar: helping the North Korean people in and of itself is political.)

PM Trulander is said to "concerned" but as there is no footage of his blubbering like a little pansy, one cannot confirm that sentiment.

One can confirm that he admires North Korea's sponsor, China:

"You know, there's a level of of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say 'we need to go green fastest . . . we need to start investing in solar.' I mean there is a flexibility that I know Stephen Harper must dream about of having a dictatorship that he can do everything he wanted that I find quite interesting."

(Sidebar: this "greenness".)


The Chinese are also complicit in the forcible repatriations of North Korean refugees and the sexual enslavement of North Korean women:

For the first time, China is under broad international censure for its forced repatriation of North Koreans crossing into its territory illegally. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry (COI), set up in 2013 to investigate the “systematic, widespread, and grave” human rights violations in North Korea, has implicated China as possibly facilitating North Korea’s commission of crimes against humanity. The COI’s 400-page report points out that over a period of two decades, China has forcibly returned tens of thousands of North Koreans almost all of whom have been subjected to inhuman treatment and punishment in the form of “imprisonment, execution, torture, arbitrary detention, deliberate starvation, illegal cavity searches, forced abortions and other sexual violence.” It calls on China to halt its collaboration with North Korean security agencies in identifying and forcing back North Koreans and to extend asylum to persons fleeing the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea). COI Chair Michael Kirby, a former justice of the High Court of Australia, in a special letter appended to the report, cautions China that its officials could be “aiding and abetting crimes against humanity” by sharing information with North Korea’s security bodies and forcibly turning back those who try to escape.

**

In a National Review article in 2005, Donna M. Hughes said that Chinese men hunt for North Korean women hiding in forests to sell these women into “marriage” after raping them. In this article, she told a disturbing story of a 22-year-old daughter who had requested help from a human rights activist because the Chinese farmer was not paying her and her family for their work. When the activist arrived to help the women, five men were leaving. Inside, he found the daughter with her clothes ripped and torn—she had been raped in front of her parents, who were helpless to prevent it.

 
Remember- Trudeau admires this government.

The Conservatives planned on resettling North Koreans stranded in southeast Asia. As unvetted Syrians take precedence (not raped Yazidi or Iraqi Christians girls because prioritising them is "disgusting"), their status is in limbo.

In short, Trudeau doesn't give a sh--.


Also: it would be worth it to hear the Pope tell Trudeau to go screw himself:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confesses he can't compel an apology from the Pope for the role of the Catholic Church in Canada's residential school system.

Well, PM Trulander can't do much of anything, really.


He's not very bright, either:

In a filmed promo clip uploaded to the Twitter account of an editor at Canada’s Maclean’s Magazine on Monday, new Canadian PM, Justin Trudeau, was asked which of the Baltic nations is his favourite. Trudeau answered, saying “that’s not a thing”.

The Olympics have clearly taught this man-child nothing.

 These colours don't run.

In other news, expect those taxes to rise:

The federal finance minister is seeking to clarify the new Liberal government's position on the GST.

Bill Morneau was asked directly Tuesday whether he has considered raising the goods and services tax as a way to generate more government revenue.

"You know, one of the things that I'm absolutely sure of is that we should go through our budget process in order to figure out where we're going to get to," Morneau told reporters in Ottawa in response to the question.

(Sidebar: in other words, yes.)

Liberal voters can't wait to have their paycheques bled dry. That thrice-deficited budget must be balanced somehow.




The Shoal Lake 40 Reservation, which has been going without clean water for eighteen years (when Chretien was PM) and whose band chiefs  made nearly seventy thousand dollars per annum for a population of six hundred and twenty-eight, will be getting a lifeline road that will do nothing whatsoever:

A reserve under one of the country's longest boil-water advisories is expected to get formal word Thursday that it will get a lifeline to the outside world after decades of living in virtual isolation.

All three levels of government are to officially announce their commitment to build an all-weather road to connect the Shoal Lake 40 First Nation to the mainland.

San Bernadino terrorists buried:

Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who opened fire on a San Bernardino holiday party earlier this month, were buried Tuesday in a quiet, graveside funeral guarded by FBI agents.

Many of those who attended mosque with the couple refused to attend, two mosque members said.

U.S.-born Farook, 28, and his Pakistani-born wife Malik, 29, killed 14 people and injured 21, in what U.S. officials have called a terrorist attack. They died later that day in a gun battle with police.

Not deep enough.



I'm sure this is a joke:

Projecting its ambition for regional leadership, Saudi Arabia said Tuesday it has lined up most of the Arab world, NATO member Turkey and several African and Asian countries behind a vaguely defined "Islamic military alliance" against terrorists.

... says the sponsor of terrorism.



Putin signed into law arbitrary decision of whether to accept the rulings of the European Court of HUman Rights:

President Vladimir Putin has signed a law allowing Russia's Constitutional Court to decide whether or not to implement rulings of international human rights courts.

The law, published on Tuesday on the government website, enables the Russian court to overturn decisions of the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) if it deems them unconstitutional.

Human Rights Watch has said the law is designed to thwart the ability of victims of human rights violations in Russia to find justice through international bodies.

The law comes after the ECHR ruled in 2014 that Russia must pay a 1.9 billion euro ($2.09 billion) award to shareholders of the defunct Yukos oil company, a verdict that added to financial pressure on Moscow as it struggles with shrinking revenues due to tumbling oil prices and Western sanctions. 

The ECHR said it had received 218 complaints against Russia in 2014 and that it had found 122 cases in which Moscow had violated the European Convention on Human Rights, including the deportation of Georgian citizens in 2006 and the incarceration of defendants in metal cages during Russian court hearings.

Russia's parliament approved the new bill last week and Putin signed it into law on Monday.

Ted Kennedy left the scene of an accident and waited until morning to report it:

And now, Christmas carols from around the world. Enjoy.



(Merci beaucoup)