For a Friday

Quite a bit happening ...




The new scandal that just won't die:

In February 2018, the prime minister of Canada spoke with even greater conviction. Norman’s case would “inevitably” lead to “court processes.”

What makes these statements by Trudeau particularly relevant is that Norman was not criminally charged until March of 2018.

Does this sound vaguely familiar? Like maybe Justin Trudeau was exerting his considerable influence on federal prosecutors to be certain to proceed against the vice-admiral?

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“Marie Henein says PMO/PCO were “counselling witnesses as to what they could and could not say.”‘

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Canadians must be on guard against government efforts to tip the scales of justice, said Vice-Admiral Mark Norman's lawyer on Wednesday, as she hailed the surprise stay of a breach-of-trust charge against her client.

That decision came despite — "not because of" — the Trudeau government's interference in the case, Marie Henein said. She alleged that included withholding key documents and information that could have helped the Canadian military's former second-in-command demonstrate his innocence on allegations he tried to undermine a federal cabinet deliberation on a large shipbuilding contract.

"No person in this country should ever walk into a courtroom and feel like they are fighting their elected government or any sort of political factors at all," Henein told a packed news conference right after Norman's final court appearance.

Why, this sounds like the government wanted to nail this man to the wall.

Isn't that what communists used to do? 

Speaking of communists:

The three new missiles North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has tested over the past week are eerily familiar to military experts: They look just like a controversial and widely copied missile the Russian military has deployed to Syria and has been actively trying to sell abroad for years.

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It is a well-known historical fact that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), for most of its dark reign covering half the planet from 1917 to 1991, represented an evil force that committed well-documented atrocities including, but not limited to, the genocide of millions of Ukrainians in the 1932-33 Holodomor, mass imprisonment and unspeakable tortures visited upon political prisoners in the Gulag Archipelago, enslavement of most of Eastern Europe under the leadership of complicit and brutal puppet regimes, and countless other crimes against humanity perpetrated all over the globe for the greater good of communism.

Imagine my surprise then, having arrived a year ago at Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square to attend an event ostensibly organized to celebrate Victory in Europe Day (VE Day — May 8, 1945), the date Western allied countries commemorate the surrender of Nazi Germany, spotting a small contingent of former Soviet Red Army soldiers, numerous Soviet display booths and even a participant waving the Hammer and Sickle flag. They were celebrating Victory Day, the Soviet version of VE Day.

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Wang’s widowed mother, to her daughter’s surprise, to this day wholeheartedly supports the policy, even though extended family members admit, with evident grief, that they left babies for dead or at very best to end up orphans. A longtime town official acknowledges the policy was difficult, both to enforce and in its cruelty. But he stresses that he is not critical of it, for he does not wish to cause trouble.

One family planning official is even less sanguine. She estimates she engaged in a staggering 50,000 to 60,000 forced sterilizations or abortions. She laments that she was effectively a mass murderer. To atone for her sins, she tells us that she now only works with the infertile. While this family planning official seeks penance, her remorseful view is the exception rather than the rule.

To wit:

Mei-ming has lain this way for 10 days now: tied up in urine-soaked blankets, scabs of dried mucus growing across her eyes, her face shrinking to a skull, malnutrition slowly shrivelling her two-year old body. The orphanage staff call her room the "dying room", and they have abandoned here for the very same reasons her parents abandoned her shortly after she was born. She is a girl. 

When Mei-ming dies four days later, it will be of sheer neglect. Afterward, the orphanage will deny she ever existed. She will be just another invisible victim of the collision between China's one-child policy and its traditional preference for male heirs. She is one of perhaps 15 million female babies who have disappeared from China's demographics since the one-child-per-family policy was introduced in 1979. ...

In one, a dozen or so baby girls sit on bamboo benches in the middle of a courtyard. Their wrists and ankles are tied to the armrests and legs of the bench. A row of plastic buckets is lined up beneath holes in their seats to catch their urine and excrement. The children will not be moved again until night, when they will be lifted out and tied to their beds. 

"They had no stimulation, nothing to play with, no one to touch them," says Blewett. In one scene, a handicapped older boy walks up to one of the girls tied to a bench and begins head-butting her relentlessly. The girl doesn't move or make a sound. Such is the lack of stimulation for the children that few of them will ever learn to speak. An endless rocking is the only exercise, the only stimulation, the only pleasure in their lives.

An official of the orphanage tells Blewett that last year, the orphanage had some 400 inmates. They were kept five to a bed in one airless room. The summer temperatures soared to around 100 degrees. In a couple of weeks, 20 percent of the babies died. "If 80 children died last summer, there should be 320 left," Blewett says to one of the assistants, "but there don't appear to be more than a couple of dozen children here. Where are the others?" The girl replies; "They disappear. If I ask where they go, I am just told they die. That's all. I am afraid to ask any more." 

Brutal neglect is the common theme of many of the orphanage scenes. In one sequence, a lame child sits on a bench near the orphanage pharmacy. It is full of medicines, but none of the staff can be bothered to administer them. The child rocks listlessly back and forth. The camera focuses on her vacant face, trails down her skinny body, and settles on her leg. It is swollen with gangrene. The worst orphanage, the home of Mei-ming, was in Guangdong, one of the richest provinces in China. 

When the documentary team arrived, there were no children to be seen or heard. Then from under one of the blankets laid over a cot. there was the sound of crying. Lifting the blanket and unwrapping a tied bundle of cloth, Blewett found a baby girl. The last layer of her swaddling was a plastic bag filled with urine and feces. The next cot was the same, and the next and the next. Many of the children had deep lesions where the string they were tied with had cut into their bodies. One child, described by staff as "normal," was suffering from vitamin B and C deficiencies, acute liver failure, and severe impetigo on her scalp. All the non-handicapped children were girls.

Also:

The South Korean government is ramping up efforts to send food aid to North Korea in an attempt to thaw relations and revive stalled denuclearization negotiations between the US and the North, but it remains unclear how Pyongyang will respond. 

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The U.S. said Thursday that it has seized a North Korean cargo ship that was used to violate international sanctions, a first-of-its kind enforcement action that comes amid a tense moment in relations between the two countries.

The "Wise Honest," North Korea's second largest cargo ship, was detained in April 2018 as it traveled toward Indonesia. It's now in the process of being moved to American Samoa, Justice Department officials said.

Officials made the announcement hours after North Korea fired two suspected short-range missiles toward the sea, the second weapons launch in five days and a possible signal that stalled talks over its nuclear weapons program are in trouble. The public disclosure that the vessel is now in U.S. custody may further inflame tensions, though U.S. officials said the timing of their complaint was not a response to the missile launch.

So much for those sanctions.

This is what the rest of Asia should be doing:

In fresh show of naval force in the contested South China Sea, a U.S. guided missile destroyer conducted drills with a Japanese aircraft carrier, two Indian naval ships and a Philippine patrol vessel in the waterway claimed by China, the U.S. Navy said on Thursday.

The comments for this article are predictably troglodyte (the parrots are frightened that someone somewhere is believing in something they don't) but considering how badly Justin wants ISIS child rapists to return to Canada and how draconian the government is in disallowing people from their natural right to defense, it's time to pony up or remove the restrictions on the freedoms of speech, belief and defense:

Surveillance cameras, alarms, access controls and vehicle barriers are becoming the new normal, and the federal government has been subsidizing the transformation.

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“The federal government has explored “a number of possible options” for bringing captured Islamic State group members back to Canada, according to a “secret” document obtained by Global News. None of the options are ideal and all present different challenges and risks,” said the three-page briefing prepared last year and recently released under the Access to Information Act. It reveals that, after a handful of Canadians were captured in Syria and Turkey, officials in the Privy Council Office, the bureaucratic department that supports the work of the prime minister, held a meeting on April 18, 2018.”

You had one job:

There was just one little problem with a video Veterans Affairs Canada published — and then quickly deleted — this week to commemorate Allied soldiers on the 74th anniversary of VE-Day: The footage began with Nazi German soldiers.

A CBC report caught the error, prompting Conservatives to hammer the Liberals over it on Friday in the House of Commons.

“Canadians were shocked to see German soldiers on ads to celebrate our Canadian warriors,” said Conservative MP Dane Lloyd . “How many levels of vetting did these ads go through?”

Probably none.




Will they or won't they?:

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May said today she expects two former Liberal MPs who quit Justin Trudeau's cabinet over the SNC-Lavalin matter will decide whether to join her party by early June.

The city of Toronto gets $45 million to deal with illegal immigrants who have flooded into Canada:

The federal government is helping the city fill a major hole in its budget with the announcement Thursday that it's giving the city $45 million to address temporary housing shortages.

Toronto is one of the communities that has been dealing with the pressures of sheltering an influx of asylum seekers and refugee claimants. 

The money comes after the government of Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced it would not provide any financial assistance to the city to deal with influx of what the province calls "illegal border crossers."

Justin will never get a pipeline built or extended and will never stop hating Alberta:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Alberta’s opposition to a carbon tax won’t influence his cabinet’s decision on whether to approve the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

“Moves that a province may or may not make will have no bearing on the approval process for important projects like the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion,” Trudeau told reporters Friday.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has promised to bring in legislation to kill Alberta’s provincial carbon tax as the first order of his new United Conservative government.

Kenney has also promised to fight in court any move by Trudeau’s government to replace the provincial levy with the federal one.

If the pearl-clutchers could post at least one offensive thing attributed to Senator Beyak, that would be great:

Ontario-based Sen. Lynn Beyak has been suspended from the Senate after failing to remove letters about Indigenous People, determined to be racist by the ethics commissioner, from her website.

Beyak has been suspended without pay for the duration of the current Parliament.