And the Rest of It

How many holders of Canadian passports put people in mass graves?:

Under the Islamic State, Naim Square was one of Raqqa’s killing grounds, where executioners shot kneeling prisoners and severed heads were left on fenceposts.

Two years after ISIS was chased from the city, it’s just a traffic circle again, surrounded by shops and restaurants, the rubble of fallen buildings and a 3D I🖤Raqqa sign.

But the past keeps resurfacing.

Across the bridge that spans the Euphrates River, on a shaded roadside, Yasser Al Khamis was supervising a team at a mass grave site that had so far yielded 18 bodies.

Surgical masks over their mouths, they dug their shovels into the dry northern dirt as traffic passed by. They kept digging until all you could see was their orange hard hats.

The locals told them about this place. They said ISIS had buried bodies between the trees, and they were right. Mostly women and children were recovered, said Al Khamis, who works for the Civil Council of Raqqa.

It was the 18^th mass grave Raqqa’s first responders team had found.

By the time Christopher Columbus was in the vicinity of North America, the Carib people were practising cannibalism.

So there's that:

Emma Howland-Bolton, a fifth-grade teacher at Clippert Multicultural Magnet Honors Academy in the Detroit Public Schools Community District, walked into school on Monday wearing a sweatshirt that read, "Columbus was a murderer."

"I wanted to wear this shirt to spark discussion," she told the station.

I'm sure you did but wouldn't engage in any such discussions unless someone agreed with you.

Not that this matters.

Saint Brendan discovered North America.

Let them fight:

Dreamworks‘ latest animated film, Abominable (2019), was banned from cinemas across Vietnam on Sunday, only a week after its release in the country.

The Associated Press (AP) reports that the Chinese-American-made film depicts a map that supports China’s long-disputed claims that it owns a specific portion of the South China Sea.

Interesting:

The Egyptian government is hailing the discovery of more than 20 wooden coffins as “one of the largest and most important” archaeological finds in the past few years.

The coffins were found in Assasif, a necropolis on the west bank of the Nile River.

Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities tweeted images of the “intact and sealed coffins” Tuesday. The sarcophagi, which were stacked in two layers in a large tomb, still boasted their original carvings of faces and hands and colours of red, green, white and black that have not faded much over time.