Where are the shoes for this?
A proposed class-action lawsuit accuses the British Columbia government of “sexism and genocide” over a decades-long practice of coercing Indigenous women into sterilization and abortions.
The lawsuit filed in B.C. Supreme Court this week says the province had a law on the books sanctioning sterilizations for 40 years before it was repealed in 1973, though the procedures allegedly continued afterward.
Where are the "knowledge-keepers" and strains of governmental woe on this?
That certainly sounds like genocide to me.
A graying country is still bent on extinction:
With the government of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida working to come up with “unprecedented” measures to raise the nation’s sluggish birthrate, local governments are also racing to draw up their boldest steps ever for child-rearing under budgets for the fiscal year starting in April.
While the local government moves might appear to be an encouraging step toward improvement, they are also giving rise to concerns about regional gaps in support measures.
The national government has set up a program to provide benefits worth a total of ¥100,000 per baby for pregnancy and childbirth. In addition, the ruling and opposition camps are discussing, as centerpieces of the envisioned measures, proposals to abolish the upper limits on parents’ incomes for receiving existing child benefits and raise the age of children eligible for the aid, with the government set to present a draft in late March.
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Japan is moving closer to approving an abortion pill for the first time, a step that could offer women more options amid calls for progress in gender equality, with a secondary panel at the health ministry expected to make a decision as early as March.
The worst disaster in modern Turkey's history, the earthquake killed, as of February 15, more than 35,000 people and injured 100,000. The death toll will likely reach 40,000 or more. According to one estimate, the quake will result in $84 billion in economic losses to Turkey, more than 10% of gross domestic product.
It was not the quake that killed tens of thousands, but politics and suicidal profit-maximization behavior on individual level.
[I]n the aftermath of the 1999 quake, Erdoğan said: "What broke here is not the fault line ... It is [the state's] sense of shame. This is [the result of] poor building planning and stealing from construction materials." Now that he is in power, Erdoğan explains that the loss of life in this month's earthquake was (God's) fate.
As part of his election campaign in 2018, Erdoğan granted "amnesty" to 7.4 million applications for unregulated buildings in return for fees, of which his government collected more than $13 billion.
More than 10,000 buildings were destroyed in the latest earthquake.
With the amnesty, contractors were allowed to skip crucial safety regulations, increasing their profits but putting residents at risk. Few buyers and tenants could guess that those permits would be their death certificates.
One of the buildings that collapsed in Hatay, one of the worst-hit provinces, was a government hospital. In 2012, experts wrote a report that the building was not earthquake-resistant. The authorities did not mind. Ironically, a bridge in the same region, built 18 centuries ago during the Roman Empire, survived unscathed.
An Israeli relief team from United Hatzalah, after having rescued 19 people under the rubble, was forced to cut short their work in Turkey and leave the country "in the face of growing security threat to the team." Yeni Akit claimed that "the Israeli team consisting of intelligence agents disguised as relief workers left Turkey in the face of threats and local people's cries of 'go home.'"
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The first time Rahim* was raped by a family member, he was six years old. In the early Nineties, three of Rahim’s uncles immigrated from Pakistan to the small town in Southern Ontario, Canada where Rahim’s family lived. He was five years old at the time; his elder sisters were nine and 14, and his baby brother was a new-born. The sexual abuse started almost immediately. Rahim says he was raped by one of his uncles “extremely frequently” for five years: two to three times a week, every week. His sisters weren’t spared either.When he was eight, Rahim told one of his sisters that he had seen their uncle naked on numerous occasions. Both of them realised that they, along with their other sister, were being sexually abused after their daily Quran class with him. “Each day he’d pick who gets to leave and who gets to stay,” Rahim says. “I got the worst of it.”In the liberal West, just implying that Pakistani communities have high rates of child sexual abuse (CSA) can result in accusations of bigotry. The subject is even more unmentionable in Pakistan itself. The nation has one of the highest rates of child sexual abuse in the world: over half a million children are raped there every year. (That is a conservative estimate.) According to recent reports, children are most at risk from the age of six, with nine being the most common age to be raped.
How Jimmy Carter deserves to be remembered:
The Cambodian Genocide was not the only one Jimmy Carter facilitated either. When the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia carried out their genocide in East Timor, he refused to withdraw his support. Two hundred thousand died as a result by the time Carter left office, and hundreds of thousands suffered torture and non-lethal starvation.
He provided aid to President Mobutu, the dictator of Zaire (how he renamed Congo), to crush South African liberation movements. In 1977, Mobutu was almost ousted, but he stayed in power thanks to the CIA and Carter administration. As a result, he presided over a country where 20% of children died before their first birthday. He died in exile in Morocco, worth 5 billion dollars.
He financially supported the Guatemalan military junta (and asked for Israel to provide them with weapons and training as well). He then asked Congress to suspend military aid to Guatemala but ensured that Israel also filled in the need there. Training of Guatemala's death squads moved to Chile and Argentina but continued under Carter's watchful eyes. These same death squads waged a genocidal campaign against anyone who opposed their regime; their trademark was the burning alive of their victims.
When the South African Defense Forces of Apartheid South Africa bombed a refugee camp in Angola and killed over 600 refugees, he refused to condemn or even entertain the idea of sanctioning them. He declared, "we hope it's just a transient strike in retaliation, and we hope it's all over." Rather than stopping apartheid, it's estimated the support of the Carter Administration helped prop up their government for another 15 years.
He purposely provided financing and armed the Mujahadeen of Afghanistan to destabilize the country, prompting the Russian invasion, and the consequences of these actions can be felt today.
The Carter Administration provided President Ferdinand Marcos billions of dollars to prop up his regime in military aid, despite the flagrant and open human rights violated by his government.
He gave aid to the military dictatorship in El Salvador and its death squads, despite the public pleas from its citizens not to do so. Said government-backed death squads assassinated them.
Jimmy Carter supported the Somoza Regime of Nicaragua and ensured that when the new government replaced it, most of the institutions and its leaders would be members of the Somoza regime. Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss.
In South Korea, the Carter administration supported the coup led by General Chun Doo Hwan and expressed that it was crucial to avoid chaos in the region. Hence, they endorsed his use of the military to consolidate power. The Carter Administration even told Chun that they would not object to their use of the military to stop the large-scale student protests all over the country. Even though his coup would ultimately fail, his troops massacred up to 2,300 civilians, though the murderers claimed a mere 165.
Discussing Nicolas Ceausescu, he exclaimed, "Our goals are the same: to have a just system of economics and politics." It didn't matter how many people he tortured to death because, after all, "We believe in enhancing human rights." I supposed Nicolae's enemies were not human in Mr. Carter's either. It's estimated the Romanian communist regime he headed killed anywhere between 500,000 and 2,000,000 over its existence.
He described Marshal Joseph Tito as "a man who believes in human rights." He personally went to pay his respect to his tomb after his funeral and laid a wreath. His regime is responsible for killing at least 500,000 people.
Six days before the beginning of the Iranian Revolution, Carter was received by the Shah, toasted him as a great man, and said that Iran was "an island of stability in one of the most troubled area of the world." While friendly with Western powers, the Shah was yet another dictator who employed death squads and tortured his subjects.
What did Carter have to say about his successor, Ayatollah Khomeini? A "holy man." His ambassador to the United Nations predicted he would go down in history as "a saint." His Iranian ambassador described Khomeini as "a Gandhi-like figure." His adviser declared he was a man of "impeccable integrity and honesty."
Thanks to Carter's response, the Shah was deposed, Khomeini took over, tens of thousands were purged after the revolution, hundreds of thousands died in the Iran-Iraq war and untold casualties around the globe due to Iran becoming the world's number one terrorism sponsors. This includes thousands of American soldiers and civilians all across the world.
Carter's "holy man" used children to clear minefields or to attack Iraqi tanks, often unarmed. "Now, why wouldn't you use grown men with training to do this," you might think. I am not saying they went around disarming the mines. I'm saying they were given sleeping bags, told that paradise waited for them, and then told to roll over the mines to clear paths for the tanks.
Why the sleeping bags? To make it easier to bury their bodies afterward.
Carter praised Kim Il Sung and said he was "vigorous, intelligent," a man "in charge of the decisions about his country." He added that he did not see North Korea as "an outlaw nation." Thanks to his involvement in the Korean Crisis in 1994, North Korea was able to develop its nuclear weapons due to the agreement he negotiated unilaterally and forced on the Clinton Administration. A deal they called 'near traitorous,' and Carter himself admitted that his goal was to force the American government to bend to his will instead of taking other actions he feared would lead to war. It sounds like he had a grand time, as well: "After Carter and Kim's formal work was done, they cruised the Taedong River together on the dictator's yacht, exchanging compliments and hunting stories, toasting one another with costly wines. Most striking was the obvious mutual attraction between Carter and a pariah who killed his own people in forced labor camps — and warmly talked of God and peace to a visiting American."
This was far from the only time he tried to bypass the American Government; for example, getting involved during the first 1991 Kuwait Invasion, contacting world leaders in an attempt to dissuade them from getting involved in the coalition that President Bush was attempting to form to liberate Kuwait back from under Saddam Hussein's boot. He tried to justify Saddam's invasion and occupation of Kuwait by saying that it was no different than Israel in regard to its disputed territories. He even went further and justified was Saddam by saying that the other Arab leaders were all corrupt (unlike Saint Saddam) and that the Arab street was sick of them. He blamed Kuwaiti intransigence and refusal for bending to his demands for the necessity of the invasion. He continued by saying that, really, America was the bad actor, not Saddam. 'We're the ones who sent troops to Lebanon. We're the ones who bombed Tripoli. We're the ones that invaded Grenada. We're the ones that invaded Panama. We're the ones that orchestrated the Contra war to overthrow the Sandinistas." Notice he managed to avoid mentioning any of his own evil actions and policies, which included attempting to prevent the Sandinistas from getting in power by funding death squads in the first place.
He famously told Haitian dictator Raul Cedras he was "ashamed of what my country has done to your country." He was criticized for once again trying to subvert American diplomacy and force the Clinton Administration to bend to his will at the time.
He praised Fidel Castro in interviews as "intelligent, dynamic still, popular" and took the side of Cuba in a dispute between his regime and America. On the issue of the Cuban Embargo, he once again tried to bypass the American Government to get it lifted, to no avail, for decades. Castro's regime is said to have brutally murdered up to 144,000 and tortured far more. Castro personally ordered the execution of children, while others were killed so their blood could be harvested and sold. After his death, his statement read: "Rosalynn and I share our sympathies with the Castro family and the Cuban people on the death of Fidel Castro. We remember fondly our visits with him in Cuba and his love of his country. We wish the Cuban citizens peace and prosperity in the years ahead."
In 1977, when asked whether the United States had a moral obligation to help Vietnam recover from the war, Jimmy Carter declared that "the destruction was mutual. You know, we went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or to impose American will on other people. We went there to defend the Freedom of the South Vietnamese. And I don't feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability."
It’s interesting to hear what former Canadian prime minister Joe Clark has to say, too, especially when he calls out Pierre Trudeau (who was leader of the opposition at the time) for having gone on a tirade in Question Period about Canada needing to condemn Iran’s acts of terrorism, which Clark had already warned him would be impossible if they wanted to protect the delicate situation with the six hostages.
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