Sunday Post

On this eve of Thanksgiving ...




The aftermath of Typhoon Hagibis:

Helicopters, boats and thousands of troops were deployed across Japan to rescue people stranded in flooded homes Sunday, as the death toll from a ferocious typhoon climbed to as high as 33. One woman fell to her death as she was being placed inside a rescue helicopter.

Typhoon Hagibis made landfall south of Tokyo on Saturday evening and battered central and northern Japan with torrents of rain and powerful gusts of wind. The typhoon was downgraded to a tropical storm on Sunday.

Public broadcaster NHK said 14 rivers across the nation had flooded, some spilling out in more than one spot.

The Tokyo Fire Department said a woman in her 70s was accidentally dropped 40 metres (131 feet) to the ground while being transported into a rescue helicopter in Iwaki city in Fukushima prefecture, a northern area devastated by the typhoon.

Department officials held a news conference to apologize, bowing deeply and long, according to Japanese custom, and acknowledged the woman had not been strapped in properly.

The government's Fire and Disaster Management Agency, which tends to be conservative in its counts, said late Sunday that 14 people died, 11 were missing and 187 were injured as a result of the typhoon. It said 1,283 homes were flooded and 517 were damaged, partially or totally.

Japanese media tallies were higher. Kyodo News agency reported that 33 people died and 19 were missing.

It wouldn't be an election with Trudeau without drama:

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau took extraordinary safety precautions at a major election rally west of Toronto Saturday, donning an armoured vest and appearing with a heavy security detail because of a threat.

If, indeed, there was a credible threat, why even appear at all? Are spectators collateral damage for this fictional gunman?


What a great way to distract people from the many, many, many scandals this government has brought on the country and gin up some sympathy for a prime minister who comes off as a douchebag.

Anything than focus on reality:

It would be a shame if this ad the CBC had removed got a bunch of views. pic.twitter.com/tUOMSFqpKV

— HoCStaffer (@HoCStaffer) October 12, 2019

How is that Singapore thing working out?:

North Korea on Thursday threatened to resume intercontinental ballistic missile tests after six European countries condemned its recent test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile. 

The official [North] Korean Central News Agency quoted a statement by a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying, "There is no guarantee that all our patience would continue indefinitely."

North Korea declared a moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests since it began talks with the U.S. last year, which U.S. President Donald Trump has touted as his biggest diplomatic achievement.

 

 

Also:

 

Many North Koreans apparently regard the highly addictive drug as a healthful picker-upper that is effective in preventing cardiovascular diseases such as stroke and cerebral hemorrhages, when in fact the opposite is true. 

Many North Korean households apparently have stashes of crystal meth, which is touted as a panacea in some regions. There are statistics supporting such accounts. The Database Center for North Korean Human Rights interviewed 1,383 defectors from the North recently and found that just 4.7 percent had either taken narcotics or witnessed another person abusing drugs there in the 1990s, but that rose sharply to 36.7 percent by 2015. 

Some 33 percent of North Korean defectors who serve time in South Korean prisons are drug offenders. According to defectors, the most widely distributed drug in North Korea is crystal meth. A gram of the narcotic costs just US$15. 

The drugs, which are manufactured for export, have been siphoned off for local distribution since the late 1990s, when there was a massive famine, because they work among other things as an appetite suppressant. Methamphetamine was a widely popular slimming drug in the West in the middle of the last century.

But with drug addiction becoming a serious problem in the North, law enforcement has started cracking down harshly on offenders. Drug-related offenses used to account for just 0.8 percent of all crimes in the North in the 1990s, but shot up to an estimated 9.3 percent after 2000 and to 20.3 percent since 2010.

This never factors into six-party talks for some reason.




And now, just in time for Halloween.