Canada Week: Mid-Week Post

 Your Prairie provinces of the work-week....



Go to the Fur. You know you want to.




The death toll from a terrorist attack in Istanbul now stands at forty-one:

Turkish authorities combed through video and witness statements Wednesday following an assault by three suicide bombers at the country’s largest airport, seeking to reconstruct an attack that killed at least 41 people and threatened to plunge Turkey into deeper uncertainty.

The death toll included 23 Turks and 18 foreigners, including at least five from Saudi Arabia and others from nations ranging from Tunisia and China, Istanbul’s governor’s official said. The Istanbul governor’s office said more than 230 people were wounded.

It is believed that ISIS is responsible.




If Mexicans are seeking asylum in Canada (vote-stealing Trudeau is more than happy to waive visa requirements), then why hasn't anyone pointed out what a human-rights nightmare Mexico must be to President Enrique Nieto?

As the federal government works on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's commitment to lift visa restrictions for Mexicans visiting Canada, two people living in Gatineau say the current process is inconvenient and humiliating.

The visa restrictions came into effect under the Conservative government in 2009 after asylum claims from Mexico almost tripled from 2005 to 2008, reaching 9,511 in 2009.

After the visa restrictions were put in place the number of claims dropped drastically, to 1,349 in 2010, and the vast majority of asylum claims from Mexico were rejected.

The visa issue has been a long-standing irritant in Canada's bilateral relationship with Mexico, with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto's government pushing hard for a resolution.

(Sidebar: how "humiliating" is it to stay in Canada?)

Teachers in a public school in New Brunswick plan a segregated prayer room for unco-operative students:

In their emails between themselves, teachers admit the Syrian students have some “cultural confusion” over gender roles — but they’re set on carrying out some of the practices that led to such confusion in the first place.

And when it comes to the male migrants at Fredericton High, a refusal to Canadianize seems to be an all-to-common theme.

Scores of emails between teachers indicate an unwillingness of the migrants to so much as attempt to speak English.

Other migrants interrupt the teachers, overpowering them by speaking to the whole class in Arabic.

Because the best way to manage a difficult situation is capitulation.

The full report on this is tomorrow.




Oh, Idle No More... it's like you don't want to get a clue:

Thus it’s purest irony that Idle No More, comprising those who meet all UN-approved specifications for indigeneity themselves, have offered full-throated support to Palestinians, whom they perceive as brothers-in-arms against colonial oppressors. In fact, it is the Jews who meet internationally endorsed measures of authentic indigeneity, while the Palestinians (a people literally 60 years old) do not.

If one was insistent that, even as a member of nomadic tribes, one was indigenous to the area, one could do better than choosing Jordanians who lob missiles at a far more sane and powerful enemy.




After the release of the most recent report on Benghazi, the Pentagon releases a key witness to the committee investigating the attack:

Members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi are slated to question a crew chief Wednesday who was stationed in Europe on the night of the Sept. 11, 2012 attack. The interview will take place one day after the committee published the highly-anticipated findings from its more than two-year investigation.

Again - why hasn't Obama been impeached?


Also - Obama screws up a simple handshake.

To be fair, the other two helped screw up, too, so...




Did Obama miss a chance to sanction Kim Jong-Un?

As of the time of this post, there are still no human rights sanctions against a single North Korean official. As bad as things may be in any of the aforementioned places, are they worse anywhere than in North Korea?

The Chairman of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry that investigated human rights abuses in North Korea has said that “the gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world” and described the abuses there as “strikingly similar” to those perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II. …

Seeking to rectify this outrage, this year, Congress passed a law that gave the President 120 days to submit a report on human rights abuses in North Korea, along with a list of those responsible. The provision requires the President to make specific findings with respect to Kim Jong-un’s individual responsibility. Those found responsible must then be designated under section 104(a) of the law, which freezes their assets and threatens secondary sanctions against those who transact with them. The 120 days ran out on June 11th.

Even before the law passed, the administration could see the overwhelming bipartisan support for human rights sanctions and began hinting at imposing them. It still didn’t act, but after the law passed, it began dropping increasingly strong hints that it would finally impose human rights sanctions on top North Korean officials. North Korea’s latest missile launch now gives the White House new impetus to increase pressure on Pyongyang, as if that impetus was lacking after the U.N. Commission released its report.

According to rumors circulating in the press and in human rights circles, the President will finally sanction “about ten” top officials of the North Korean government today. [Update: Now we know that Monday wasn’t the day. Watch this space.] The rumor I heard last week is that His Porcine Majesty Kim Jong-un, the morbidly obese despot who rules over millions of malnourished and stunted children, will be among them.

(Kamsahamnida)





New documents catch former IRS head Lois Lerner in the act of breaking the law:

“It took an organization over 50 months of investigation and multiple lawsuits to get clarity on the IRS’s own compliance with the rules it enforces against others,” says Dan Epstein, the executive director of the Cause of Action Institute and a former attorney for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “The IRS, in the midst of its political targeting of groups engaged in policy advocacy, was engaging in the disclosure of millions of records aimed at ginning up prosecutions of these groups without going through the legally required channels.”

A prisoner tunnel from the Nazi era was found in Lithuania:

In a Lithuanian forest, an international research team has pinpointed the location of a legendary tunnel that Jewish prisoners secretly dug out with spoons to try to escape their Nazi captors during World War II, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday.

The tunnel, located in the Ponar forest, known today as Paneriai, outside of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, is the site where some 100,000 people, including 70,000 Jews, were killed and thrown into pits during Nazi occupation.

And now, a happy dog because happy dog: