Sunday Post

The South Korean government has sent oil - which is sanctioned - by train to North Korea.

This North Korea:

HRNK published its most recent satellite imagery report on Camp No. 25 in November 2016, finding that the political prison camp’s perimeter “was dramatically expanded” during 2010. That expansion included “two previously separate agriculture fields in the northwest area of the camp” […] 17 additional guard positions were erected, predominately along the new perimeter line.”[4] Efforts to monitor Camp No. 25 as well as the other known kwan-li-so and kyo-hwa-so in North Korea remain ongoing, and recent research using Google Earth has revealed updated imagery of Camp No. 25 from November 6, 2017 showing probable prisoners and guards in the field of the camp.

** 

In early July, another reporting partner investigated conditions in Saet-Byeol County of North Hamkyung Province and was shocked by the devastation.

"Living in one of the squalid houses was a young boy and an elderly woman whose son had died of tuberculosis earlier in the year. She said that she had no money or food and that she and her grandson were surviving on 3 kilos of corn borrowed from a neighbor. However, the neighbor who had lent him the corn was pressuring her into paying back the debt. Her grandchild was just skin and bones."

**

While the Kim Jong-un regime is abroad promoting itself as a partner for dialogue, it is also strengthening its surveillance of and control over the activities of North Korean citizens.

One of the methods used to monitor the activities of residents is the 'census'. Police officers and leaders of the Inminban (neighborhood watch group) visit homes to check for inconsistencies between the family’s official register and its actual residency situation. Even though the North Korean government issued new "nationality cards” in 2011, the Kim Jong-un regime is working on creating new identification cards to oversee residents and deal with the large numbers of defectors, missing persons, and people relocating without authorization.

(Kamsahamnida)




Good luck with that, Africa:

The chief executive of Africa’s largest bank says the continent’s leaders are likely to press their Chinese hosts at a conference this week to help narrow their trade imbalances with Beijing by shifting more manufacturing to Africa.

China has passed Europe and the United States as the biggest trading partner of most African countries. Most run large trade deficits with Beijing, exporting minerals and buying Chinese manufactured goods.

The chief executive of South Africa’s Standard Bank Group, Sim Tshabalala, told reporters he believed the trade imbalance “will be placed firmly on the table” by delegates to the conference this week in Beijing.

China’s commercial presence in Africa has prompted complaints in some countries that the continent gets too little economic benefit from the relationship.

Good:

The Pentagon says it’s taken final steps to cancel $300 million in planned aid to Pakistan.

And:

Israel's prime minister on Sunday welcomed the U.S. decision to stop funding the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, accusing it of perpetuating a crisis that lies at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Also:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week called Khan to offer congratulations on his win and tweeted a photo of himself talking on the call.

And that, for my reader Harris and now for me, is the salt in the Aasia Bibi wound — that this government, which so smarmily wraps itself in its anti-racism/pro-diversity creed, has had virtually nothing to say about the plight of the 53-year-old mother of five.

There are two prominent Pakistani-Canadians in federal politics.

One is Salma Ataullahjan, Canada’s first senator of Pakistani and Pashtun descent (she was born in Marden, near the Afghan border). She came to Canada in 1980 as a young bride and was described, by former prime minister Stephen Harper who appointed her to the Senate, as “bringing a Muslim voice into Canadian political life.”

Ataullahjan has spoken out about Bibi, and indeed, shortly after her 2010 conviction, visited the country to see flood-ravaged areas and actually raised Bibi’s case, and the blasphemy laws, with senior Pakistani ministers.

And, when Shahbaz Bhatti was murdered the following year, she and then Multicultural Minister Jason Kenney, as well as other Canadian embassy staff, attended his funeral. She spoke poignantly in the Senate about sitting “by my friend’s coffin.”

The other is Iqra Khalid, Liberal MP for Mississauga-Erin Mills in Ontario.

Harris says he tried to interest her in the issue — she is after all a young Pakistani-Canadian too, born in Pakistan — but “she wouldn’t even acknowledge my existence, let alone grace me with a response.”

That is because Iqra Khalid is a little b!#ch.



 
To remind one: "Canada isn't doing well right now because it's Albertans who control our community and socio-democratic agenda. It doesn't work," Trudeau told interviewer Patrick Lagacé.

According to a report, “Alberta’s withdrawal from the national climate change strategy may hurt the pipeline in the long run, he said. “In order to build a large project such as a pipeline, you need to have a very effective climate action plan and you need to be mindful of your obligations to consult Indigenous peoples,” Sohi said in an interview Friday with CBC Radio’s Edmonton AM. “Without those, you will not get a pipeline built.” 

 
This pipeline?:

In the aftermath of the Federal Court of Appeal’s horrendous decision to stop work on the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, this is what one pipeliner told me that day:

“Eight thousand jobs disappeared this morning, and one of them was mine.”

He was already at work on the project. His whole life for the next several years was wrapped up in the project. In the coming days, it is all but certain his job will be gone, like the thousands of other people who had aligned their lives with this project.

Many of those act as subcontractors, with their own welding firms or consulting firms. That means there will be no employment insurance for them. And since many other jobs are already crewed up for the season, it may be tough to find other work.

Further:

Across several important files, the Liberals have tried to reconcile their belief in their own superior virtue with their desire for worldly success by insisting that they were not obliged to choose between them because, in fact, no choices needed to be made. They could be both for saving the planet and for building pipelines, both for Aboriginal reconciliation and for resource development, both for progressive social values and for free trade. ...

The mishandling of each is by now familiar. On pipelines, the Liberals first allowed the options to dwindle to one; then signalled such desperation that the last option, the Trans Mountain extension, be built that they were obliged to pay its private-sector sponsor several billion dollars to take it off its hands; only to discover, thanks to this week’s Federal Court of Appeal ruling, that they had no lawful authority to build it, having failed to engage in the same meaningful consultation with Aboriginal groups they had demanded of the previous government, and had made such a show of promising themselves.

On carbon taxes, the Liberals had seemed, in the heady first months of office, to lure the provinces into the trap they had set for them, wherein the latter would impose the tax on their behalf, keeping the revenues in return. Alas, they failed to secure the acquiescence of the public, who would after all be the source of those revenues, mistaking popular support for the bromide that “something must be done” about the environment with the lesser-known “and I should be the one to pay for it.”

They set the initial carbon price at a level too low to make much difference but just high enough to annoy. And if suspicions of a revenue grab were not already in the air, they added to them by failing to offer any offsetting cut in taxes — the downside of the let-the-provinces-do-it gambit. They now find a growing number of provinces refusing to enlist, while the rest cast an uneasy eye on their electorates.

It was clear prior to the 2015 election, the one in which thirty-nine percent of the Canadian electorate voted for a classless buffoon whose father was once ruinous to the country and whose sympathies lie with foreign communists and Islamists, that Justin was as fit to lead the country as a mouse is to beat an elephant in an arm-wrestling match.

Failure after costly failure (deliberate or otherwise) have proven what people already guessed.

Are the people of Canada angry enough to turf him?

Nope.

So, now they are getting, good and hard, what they voted for then and what they tolerate now.

Good luck with that.



From the most "transparent" government in the country's history:

As a goodly portion of the Western world knows by now, Hussain was 29 when on July 22, he walked along several blocks of Danforth Avenue in Toronto’s east end and shot at groups of people enjoying the warm summer evening on sidewalk patios.

He killed a young woman, 18-year-old Reese Fallon, and a 10-year-old girl, a competitive synchronized swimmer named Julianna Kozis, and injured 13 others.

Then, he exchanged gunfire with Toronto police and was dead of a gunshot wound shortly after. 

Multiple sources have said the lethal wound was self-inflicted, but that aspect of the shooting is under investigation by Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU), which probes all encounters with police in the province that end in death or serious injury (and often, those which do not involve serious injury and occasionally even any injury at all, a fact which, bewilderingly, sometimes takes the unit weeks to discover).

Why on earth revealing Hussain’s actual birth date — was he a Taurus or an Aquarius? — would be of interest to anyone but astrology buffs remains unexplained. ...

Scutt was in Superior Court Friday in downtown Toronto to oppose a media application that would see three search warrant applications (formally called Informations to Obtain a Search Warrant, or ITOs) in the case of the Danforth shooter unsealed and made public.

A coalition of media organizations, including The New York Times, CBC, The Globe and Mail and Postmedia and represented by Paul Schabas and Kaley Pulfer, was arguing before Judge David Corbett that the police were relying on general claims of potential disadvantage — the usual claims, in other words — to support a bid to keep the ITOs under wraps.

The usual reasons, which Schabas said are cited routinely to keep secret information that the law says presumptively should be public, are to protect the integrity of an “ongoing investigation,” “innocent third parties” and police “investigative techniques.”

But that, Schabas said, “is just not good enough.”

Just as police are supposed to have reasonable and probable grounds to get a search warrant approved by a justice of the peace or a judge in the first place, so should they be required to explain why the information in the warrant shouldn’t be disclosed publicly. ...

As the judge said at one point Friday, pointing to the blacked-out Hussain date of birth, “For example, this man’s birthday… how could that…?” Corbett shrugged, clearly meaning, how could that have any effect upon anything?

Scutt began to reply that the date of birth was a “personal detail” when Corbett interrupted him and said, “Of the deceased shooter?”

Two of the warrants were for police to search the family apartment in Thorncliffe Park where Hussain lived (the first was refused, it appears for a technical reason), while the third saw police search one of its own property rooms for reasons that were blacked out.

Scutt used an affidavit of Det.-Sgt. Terry Browne, the lead investigator in the Hussain case.

He said police still needed the ITO sealed because while Hussain is dead, they are still investigating why he shot up the street, how he got the gun, whether anyone assisted him, and the role his mental health may have played. Browne also said police need more time to review the extensive video surveillance and are still waiting for “other agencies” to respond to requests for information. He estimated the probe would continue “for several months.”

**

(Sidebar: below is a translation of an article from a French-language publication. The original can be found here.)

Interviewed asylum seekers have all spent nearly a month with their children in the old Royal Victoria after their arrival in the Canada. In total, the residence has 107 rooms in which are 500 stretchers. It is currently home to 193 people.
 
The YMCA receives Government a budget of $44 per day and $ 24 for children to host and feed residents. Thus, for a family of four, the YMCA receives $136 per room for one day, $4080 per month. On Airbnb, there are luxury apartments furnished downtown for half of this amount.

To verify the allegations of the claimants, we first asked access to YMCAS of Quebec, the Agency which manages the temporary residence, then the integrated University in health and social services (CIUSSS) of the Centre-Ouest-de-l'Ile-de-Montreal, which commissioned the YMCA. The request has been denied. "Access to temporary hosting sites is allowed only to the customer and employees working there, and this, at all times."

This decision can be explained for reasons of confidentiality and the fact that these sites are living environments", the Manager of media relations and Political Affairs of the CIUSSS, Emmanuelle Paciullo wrote. The directive also applies to the other three centres that host asylum seekers in Montreal.
 
La Presse argued that there was no question to infringe the privacy of the residents - we must obtain the consent of individuals before you interview them - and in this case, we asked to see the facilities and not to interview asylum seekers. In vain.

Other steps the Department of Immigration, diversity and Inclusion (MIDI) and health and Social Services have also drawn a blank.

When we talked about the need for transparency and accountability, we ran to the same answer: "the privacy and security of our customers remain essential", wrote M^me Paciullo after our requests repeated.

This complete blocking of information and this denial of access bristle Federation of professional journalists of Québec (FPJQ). "This is not acceptable. It's been years that the FPJQ denounces the secret between the Government of Quebec. These facilities are paid for by taxpayers and citizens have the right to know under which asylum seekers are accommodated. ', ton Stéphane Giroux, president of the organization.

"Journalists have access to camps of refugees even in dictatorial countries and here, we say no? It doesn't have sense. »

And one wonders why Maxime Bernier seems like an attractive alternative: 

To understand my real motives, my critics should read up on “public choice theory.” Developed by James Buchanan, who won a Nobel prize for economics in 1986, it explains how interest groups hijack political debates and capture politicians, winning huge benefits in the form of subsidies, trade protection, fiscal or legal privileges and other favourable regulations. They are willing to devote enormous lobbying effort and large amounts of money to get them.

Of course, ordinary taxpayers ultimately have to pay for these benefits. But a favour worth millions, even billions, of dollars to an interest group may cost only a few dollars to each individual taxpayer. Why would anyone make the effort to understand, let alone oppose, complex government policy? It’s just not worth it. As public choice theory explains, “rational ignorance” is a much better default mode.

This dynamic, of “concentrated benefits versus dispersed costs,” explains why we have so many bad policies that are obviously not in the public’s interest, why it is so difficult to reform such policies, and why government keeps growing: The number of groups a politician can pander to in order to buy votes is endless.

(Paws up)




Why even bother claiming asylum? Why not just stay? It's not like anyone will turf you:

As the Aug. 31 deadline for Saudi students to leave Canada passes, at least 20 students are filing asylum claims in an attempt to stay in the country.