And the Rest of It

Quite a bit going on ...




US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reminds Iran that it needs to negotiate with the US:

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday that the United States needed Iran to “come to the table” for negotiations, amid rising tensions between Washington and Tehran.

Pompeo, speaking at a counter-terrorism summit in Buenos Aires, also repeated an offer from President Donald Trump for talks without preconditions.

U.S.-Iran tensions have risen since Trump last year abandoned a nuclear deal under which Tehran agreed to curtail its nuclear program in return for the lifting of global sanctions crippling its economy.

Iran on Friday denied a claim by Trump that the U.S. Navy had destroyed one of its drones in the Strait of Hormuz, the latest episode to rattle nerves amid rising concern both sides could blunder into a war in the Gulf.

People have been speaking out against the Chinese dictatorship since that government thought it could mow down people in Tienanmen Square. I doubt that they will be listened to now:

Sairagul Sauytbai, an ethnic Kazakh who fled China last year after working in a so-called vocational training centre for ethnic minorities, wanted to tell others about the beatings and torture she said she had seen there.

But in neighbouring Kazakhstan, where she arrived to seek refuge, she was accused of crossing the border illegally, stripped naked, and told by state security agents to keep quiet about Beijing’s “de-radicalisation drive”, in which it has put hundreds of thousands of people in camps akin to prisons, Sauytbai and her lawyer told Reuters.


The plight of Sairagul and others who have fled China‘s western Xinjiang region because of the camps highlights the difficulties they face in neighbouring countries that have close ties with Beijing, and explains why many remain silent about their experiences.

Human rights groups say China has detained up to a million people in camps set up throughout Xinjiang, a region where Muslim Uighurs are the biggest ethnic group and where ethnic tensions have in the past resulted in violence.

(Sidebar: I'll just leave this right here.)

**

The incident involving practitioner Gerry Smith was “very troubling,” and part of a wider pattern of coercion by Beijing’s representatives, said Alex Neve, Canadian head of Amnesty International.

But Ottawa continues to handle the issue with a scattershot approach that leaves possible victims unclear how to get help, he said.

“When something happens, they don’t really know where should they turn to report this,” he said. “Is this a criminal law matter, is this a security and intelligence matter, is this just a diplomatic incident? Is it all of the above, is it none of the above?”

(Sidebar: oh, they know. They just don't care.)




Good:

Three men accused of the murder of two Scandinavian hikers in the Atlas Mountains last year have been sentenced to death, an anti-terrorism court in Morocco decided Thursday.

Maren Ueland, 28, of Norway and Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, of Denmark, were killed in their tent in December near the Moroccan village of Imlil, a popular hiking destination. The incident was labeled by Moroccan authorities as a terror attack after some of the men involved pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.

The men were tried under an anti-terrorism law and were the main defendants in a case that put two dozen suspects on trial over the women’s deaths last year.

After a seven-month trial, Abdessamad Al Joud, Younes Ouziad and Rachid Afatti were sentenced to death, while a fourth man, Abderahman Khayali, was handed a life sentence, according to Moroccan state television.

Now that is a letter:

The late champion boxer Muhammad Ali sent a condolence letter to Mary Jo Kopechne’s father after her death 50 years ago, telling him to sue Ted Kennedy “for everything he’s got,” her family said.

The Kopechne family, whose 28-year-old daughter Mary Jo drowned July 18, 1969, after the car driven by Kennedy careened off a bridge into the water, had never shared the letter publicly before, the Times Leader reported.

The short, handwritten letter is dated July 31, 1969, to Joseph Kopechne, who died in 2003. He signed it “Muhammad Ali Cassius Clay.” The letter was released by cousins of Mary Jo Kopechne.

“Dear Mr. Kopechne, assert yourself in the interests of the good name of your daughter. Get yourself a good lawyer and sue that no good son of a bitch, Edward M. Kennedy, for everything he’s got,” Ali wrote.

 
It is a tiger. If it wants to sleep on a bed, then there it shall stay:

A homeowner in the flood-stricken Indian state of Assam entered his bedroom on Thursday to find a fully-grown, slightly exhausted female tiger snoozing on his bed.


The tiger was first spotted crossing the highway boundary that surrounds Kaziranga National Park on Thursday morning, according to the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), an animal welfare organization operating in the area. The forested park is home to hundreds of animals, but over 95 per cent of its area has been submerged by the floodwaters, WTI says.

“Probably disturbed, [the tiger] jumped across the wall of a scrap garage and took refuge in the dark room,” WTI tweeted.

The homeowner discovered the tiger in his bedroom a short time later and called in forestry officials to remove it.

Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins achieved, against great odds, a feat that has yet to be re-duplicated:

At a House congressional committee in 1997, part of his ongoing effort to drum up interest in getting humans to Mars, Aldrin spoke about what he saw as the value of the first moon landing. “In the last 27 years, one thing has stood out that, as I meet people, they want me to know where they were when we were on the moon, and they remember vividly that particular day,” he said. “It’s not the value of the rocks that we brought back, or the great poetic statements that we all uttered. Those things aren’t remembered. It’s that people witnessed that event.”

The moon landing, after all, wasn’t about Armstrong or Aldrin; it was about us. Fifty years on, the two men who took those first steps are extensions of us, partly real, partly imagined: the stoic, unknowable commander and the brilliant, flawed pilot.

If Armstrong showed us what we should aspire to be, it was Aldrin who showed us who we are.

All of those men had to live with the reality of what they and hundreds of engineers and other staff had done. Standing on the moon's surface, looking down on the blue pearl that is Earth, they did what no one else had done and lived in the shadow of that enormous feat for the rest of their days.