Mid-Week Post

 
Your work-week ball of random fun ...



The story so far.


 
Tell all the truth but tell it slant:

Jody Wilson-Raybould wrote to the chair of the justice committee Tuesday evening to say that while she will agree to give testimony before MPs on Wednesday, she will not be able to speak freely because of constraints that still exist around what she can and can’t talk about.

 
Consider that with everything that Justin and his worthless band of crooks have done to this country, this is the straw that breaks the camel's back:

A new Angus Reid poll shows a clear majority of 66% of Canadians saying “there is a deeper scandal within the Prime Minister’s Office and more information will emerge.”

Not his love for China, not his irrational aversion of Yazidis, not his pay-for-play scandals, not Aga Khan, not India, not his groping, not his destroying the oil sector, not his screwing up trade deals, not his demand for ideological conformity, not his tantrums, not his idiocy, not his bribing the press, not his taxes, not his undeserved sense of entitlement. This - a scandal surrounding one Quebec-based company, remediation laws that were rushed in under cover and the demotion of a lackey who may well be angling for something.

Canadians truly reflect the government they vote for.


Also - Canadians aren't tired enough of Liberal corruption:

With the ongoing PMO Scandal, the number of Canadians who disapprove of Justin Trudeau has risen once again, according to an Angus Reid poll:

60% of Canadians view Trudeau unfavourably, while 40% view him favourably.

That gives Trudeau a net -20 rating.

Scheer’s numbers are better, with 46% viewing him favourably and 54% viewing him unfavourably.

That gives Scheer a net -8 rating.


And while Jagmeet Singh’s recent by-election win gives him the chance to reset his image, he’s starting from a brutally low point.

Just 36% view him favourably, while 64% view him unfavourably.


Singh’s net -28 rating is by far the worst.

 
Why would anyone allow back in people who not only raped children but never believed that they were Canadian, anyway?:

The RCMP is preparing for the return of at least a dozen Canadians detained in Syria amidst the collapse of the so-called Islamic State, a senior law enforcement official has told Global News.

(Sidebar: what? Not sixty?)

The capture of suspected Canadian ISIS members, and uncertainty over their fate due to a planned U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria, has prompted the RCMP to ramp up preparations for their possible arrival.

As part of a national strategy now being put in place, police are working with prosecutors to prepare charges and peace bonds against the detainees, and speaking with allies to manage their return to Canada.

“We need to get ready in case they come back sooner than what we had expected,” Deputy Commissioner Gilles Michaud, who heads the RCMP’s federal policing branch, said in an interview Wednesday.

Also - a judge will decide in March whether to declare convicted and unrepentant terrorist Omar Khadr's sentence expired or not:

An Alberta judge is to rule next month whether former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Omar Khadr should have his eight-year sentence for war crimes declared expired.

 
This is odd:

A group of unidentified assailants bound and gagged workers inside the gated embassy compound on Feb. 22 for four hours, according to Spain’s El Confidencial news site, which first reported the incident on Wednesday.

The site said that a woman escaped from the assailants and that her screams prompted residents in the affluent Madrid neighbourhood where the embassy is located to call police.

A National Police spokesman confirmed to The Associated Press that its officers assisted a North Korean woman with unspecified injuries. The spokesman, who wasn’t authorized to be named in media reports, declined to comment further.

An Interior Ministry official who was also bound by customary rules of anonymity said the incident was “under investigation” and noted that North Korean authorities hadn’t filed any official complaint.

The embassy couldn’t be reached for comment Wednesday.

Alejandro Cao de Benos, an aide to the North Korean government who takes media, business and other visitors to the secluded country and organizes cultural exchange programs with Pyongyang, told the AP that he had spoken to embassy staff who had told him that the assailants had taken computers and cellphones before escaping.

 
If Trump's making Kim Jong-Un feel at ease is part of a larger strategy to coax him out of building a nuclear arsenal, why hasn't it worked (the token measure of dismantling the Yongbyon facility might be good enough for Moon's pro-North Korea administration until Kim rattles his sabre again):

Making Kim feel respected and secure, they say, offers a possible way to persuade him to give up – or at least scale back – his nuclear arsenal in return for economic and diplomatic rewards.

“I am not a Trump supporter on 99 percent of what he does. But, strangely enough, his instincts have been right about North Korea,” Joel Wit, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington who was involved in past negotiations with the North Koreans while at the State Department.

**

North Korea has a clandestine base that houses intermediate-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting Okinawa Prefecture, a U.S. think tank said Friday.

The Sangnam-ni missile operating base, located 250 km north of the demilitarized zone dividing the two Koreas, is one of an estimated 20 undeclared ballistic missile bases in North Korea, the Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a report.

And remember:

Whoever claims that North Korea will denuclearize once the United States makes security assurances in the form of declaring an end to the Korean War needs to explain why these security assurances will succeed while those made in 1994, 2000, and 2005 failed.

— Abraham M. Denmark (@AbeDenmark) February 25, 2019

 

Are human rights on the table?:

Human rights have often been raised in major diplomatic negotiations. President Ronald Reagan kept a firm line on Soviet human rights abuses even as he sought major nuclear weapons reduction treaties with the USSR. President Bill Clinton’s envoy for the Balkans peace talks, Richard Holbrooke, did not shy away from raising human rights concerns with leaders like Slobodan Milošević during negotiations. The Dayton Peace Accords directly addressed the topic.

Indeed, in many cases diplomatic negotiations are more likely to succeed when they are comprehensive—focusing not merely on a narrow issue but putting multiple topics on the table, especially if they are interlinked. In North Korea, human rights issues are inextricably linked with the weapons proliferation program, since the military widely uses forced labor to build infrastructure and support its operations, as U.S. officials have previously noted.

Many North Korea experts, including some who have participated in previous talks, acknowledge that raising human rights in negotiations is a practical necessity. It is widely understood that successful and durable verification of any counter-proliferation process will require North Korea to not only restore access to the International Atomic Energy Agency but also improve its cooperation with the UN system in general. Verifying counter-proliferation agreements is hard enough in authoritarian countries. It is much harder yet in totalitarian ones.

Negotiators should ask North Korea, as a start, to begin broader cooperation with the UN system, as a trust building exercise and path toward other international visits. Similarly, the United States should press North Korea to join the International Labour Organization and end its endemic use of forced labor. Cooperation with these requests can serve as an initial benchmark of a willingness to reform.

In the end, however, the simplest reason why human rights need to be part of the conversations in a negotiation intended to result in broad relief from U.S. sanctions is that there is no other choice: under a key law passed in 2016, a significant part of the broader-based sanctions imposed on North Korea’s government are specifically related to human rights issues. Under U.S. law, these broader sanctions cannot be lifted, or even waived, unless North Korea takes steps to improve its human rights record.

(Sidebar: it should be reiterated that the UN is one of the reasons why North Korea is a crap-hole today, but I digress ..)


Also - lying is what communists do naturally:

Harunori Kojima still remembers the hot tears of joy that warmed his face against the sleet as two Soviet ships set sail in December 1959 from Niigata port.

Destination: North Korea, which lured nearly 100,000 Koreans from Japan with fantastical propaganda promising returnees a “Paradise on Earth.”

Now 88, Kojima recalls how a brass band piped out patriotic tunes lauding North Korean leader Kim Il Sung as some 1,000 people boarded the ships for a new life.

They were part of a grand repatriation program that continued on and off until 1984, carried out by the Red Cross Societies in Japan and North Korea and paid for by Pyongyang.

In all, 93,340 people — mainly Koreans but also Japanese spouses — enthusiastically moved to North Korea, blissfully unaware it was a land of no return.

Initially reluctant, the Japanese government also backed the scheme, with media touting it as a humanitarian campaign for Koreans struggling to build a life in Japan.

But Kojima, who was a communist at the time and helped oversee the repatriation, never went to North Korea himself and now looks back on the scheme with bitterness.

“I was actively involved in the project, believing it was something positive. But as a result, I led people into hell,” he said.

 
(Kamsahamnida)



Things heat up as India and Pakistan do battle over the disputed Kashmir region:

India and Pakistan both said they shot down each other's fighter jets on Wednesday, with Pakistan capturing an Indian pilot a day after Indian warplanes struck inside Pakistan for the first time since a 1971 war, prompting world powers to urge restraint.

Both countries have ordered air strikes over the last two days, the first time in history that two nuclear-armed powers have done so, while ground forces have exchanged fire in more than a dozen locations.

Tensions have been running high since at least 40 Indian paramilitary police died in a Feb. 14 suicide car bombing by Pakistan-based militants in Indian-controlled Kashmir, but the risk of conflict rose dramatically on Tuesday when India launched an air strike on what it said was a militant training base.

A senior Indian government source said that 300 militants were killed in Tuesday's strike. Pakistan says no one was killed.

A polar cub boom?:

As I reported in the 2018 State of the Polar Bear Report, the latest survey and research results suggest that polar bears probably number about 29,500 across the Arctic, with a wide margin of potential error. That’s up since 2005, when the count was about 24,500, despite low summer sea ice since 2007. Polar bears have proven to be more flexible in their habits and more capable in open water than scientists assumed. Long-term trends in sea ice cannot be used to explain individual events, like the mauling deaths this summer in Nunavut or the invasion of fat bears on Novaya Zemlya.

Furthermore, scientists who support the use of polar-bear tragedy porn by media and conservation activists to promote climate-change hysteria don’t do themselves any favours. Two years ago, biologist Steven Amstrup from Polar Bears International condoned the use of a now infamous starving polar bear video to spread climate alarmism: National Geographic later had to apologize for the misrepresentation. But University of Alberta biologist Andrew Derocher’s recent online comment about the Belushaya Guba bears (“it may not be climate change but it’s consistent with the predicted impacts of climate change”) suggests that some scientists still think it’s OK to mislead the public about polar bears when promoting climate change alarm.

For God's sake, don't tell the Democrats about this kid:

Keio University in Tokyo said Tuesday that a baby with a birth weight of 268 grams had been released from care at its hospital after growing to a weight of 3,238 grams, becoming the smallest boy in the world to be sent home healthy.

The previous record holder was born weighing 274 grams in Germany in 2009, the university said, citing the University of Iowa’s registry for the world’s tiniest babies. The smallest girl was born weighing 252 grams, also in Germany, in 2015.

There had been 23 babies worldwide who survived after having been born prematurely and weighing under 300 grams, out of whom only four were boys, according to the Tiniest Babies Registry website.

The boy from Tokyo was born through an emergency cesarean section in August as his weight did not increase at 24 weeks gestation and doctors determined his life was in danger, the university said.

The baby was so small at birth that he could fit in a pair of hands. But after doctors treated him at a neonatal intensive care unit at the hospital, by managing his breathing and nutrition, he grew steadily and was able to be breastfed. He left the hospital last Wednesday, two months after the initial due date.