“Media reports that I have drawn or believe
there is a link between abortion and breast
cancer are incorrect…”
Eric Abetz.com … Friday, 08 August 2014 09:58
Category: news
For far too many years suicide prevention has not engaged the perspectives of those who have lived through suicidal experiences. Because of social stigma and fear, as well as personal shame, a culture of silence prevailed. The Way Forward represents a seminal moment in this field’s history; it is an opportunity to benefit from the lived experience of suicide attempt survivors. Many of its recommendations are derived from evidence-based practices, and several are aspirational. All are grounded in the evidence of recovery and resiliency that is clear in the lives of our Task Force members. Viewing suicide prevention through the lens of the eight core values presented in The Way Forward can help us enhance safety while also bringing hope and meaning to those in suicidal despair.
The Core Values represent the group consensus on the values that attempt survivors want suicide prevention professionals and organizations to consider when developing or implementing suicide prevention supports. Research has indicated that promoting protective factors and addressing risk factors for suicide can prevent suicidal behavior.Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that activities that support the Core Values have the potential to prevent future suicide attempts, and improve the quality of life for people who have survived a suicide attempt.
Foster hope and help people find meaning and purpose in life
Preserve dignity and counter stigma, shame, and discrimination
Connect people to peer supports
Promote community connectedness
Engage and support family and friends
Respect and support cultural, ethnic, and/or spiritual beliefs and traditions
Promote choice and collaboration in care
Provide timely access to care and support
Zak Mohyuddin was born in Bangladesh, raised in Pakistan and moved to Tennessee years ago, in the 1970s. He was 18 when he arrived. Today, at age 58, he’s a longtime resident in Tullahoma, a small town in Coffee County, halfway between Nashville and Chattanooga...
excerpt…
…But something else also happened — hitting close to home for Mohyuddin. Barry West — an elected commissioner at the time in the same county that Mohyuddin ran to represent — posted something online that made Mohyuddin shudder.
On West’s Facebook page, he shared an image showing a man with a double-barrel shotgun aiming, with eye closed. The caption read, “How to wink at a Muslim.” It went viral. But instead of ignoring it, Mohyuddin reached out to West and invited him over to his house for dinner.
Mohyuddin said that, during their evening together, West told him how he felt that the “word Muslim and terrorist were one and the same.”
“He didn’t think there was anything he’d done that was out of place,” Mohyuddin said. West said he was surprised by Mohyuddin’s dinner invite, but accepted. He said, “So, I apologized, and went to Zak’s home, my son and I.”
“We met with his family, and just had a real good conversation about the world situation, and what I had done. We were just full of questions,” West said, “because I had never been around a Muslim that close, to ask about his religion, or what he believes in.”
Mohyuddin said that it was important for him to reach out to a neighbor. “It’s not like I’m an immigrant living in a big city, where I can stay within my own community and remain in a bubble,”
PRI’s The World
Remembering and imagining appear to be very different functions, one recovering true information from the past, the other considering the unreal or exploring the future. And yet many patients with damage to the hippocampus (a structure in the temporal lobes) – and resultant memory impairment – struggle in imagining the future. Moreover, neuroimaging data show the hippocampus is involved in both tasks. Taken together, this evidence suggests that memory for the past and imagination for the future may depend on shared neural processes.
A new imaging study by Brock Kirwan and his colleagues confirms at a broad anatomical level that both memory and future imagination call on similar regions of the hippocampus. But the research also shows how these two mental functions do depend on distinct neural processes after all.
Fourteen study participants were invited into a scanner where they were presented with photographs in a series of runs. One run contained…
... SIMPLY CLICK HERE TO ACCESS THIS PIECE IN FULL & FREE @ THE BRITISH PSYCHOLOGICAL SOCIETY RESEARCH BLOG…
Best-selling author and renowned neuropsychiatrist Daniel Siegel explains why adolescents turn to their peers and away from their parents for security, attachment, and approval.
This clip is from a March 11, 2014 talk for the UC Berkeley
The 72-hour ceasefire in Gaza has entered its final day. Talks are ongoing to extend the truce, but no agreement has been reached. Palestinian and Israeli officials are in Egypt, however have not held face-to-face negotiations on securing a lasting ceasefire. Meanwhile, Gaza is in a state of devastation and ruin. Close to 1,900 Palestinians were killed during the 29-day conflict, including at least 1,354 civilians, of whom 415 are children. More than 10,000 people have been injured. There are 373,000 children who require psychological support. Some 500,000 Palestinians have been displaced with 187,000 still living in U.N. emergency shelters. An estimated 10,000 homes have been completely destroyed, and 30,000 homes partially destroyed. On the Israeli side, 64 soldiers were killed in Gaza, and three civilians in Israel. We go to Jerusalem to speak with Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The 72-hour ceasefire in Gaza has entered its final 24 hours. Talks are ongoing to extend the truce, but no agreement has been reached. Palestinian and Israeli officials are in Egypt but have not held face-to-face negotiations on securing a lasting ceasefire.
Meanwhile, Gaza is in a state of devastation and ruin. Close to 1,900 Palestinians were killed during the 29-day offensive, including at least 1,354 civilians, of whom 415 are children. More than 10,000 people have been injured.
AMY GOODMAN: There are 373,000 children who require psychological support. Half a million Palestinians have been displaced, with at least 187,000 still living in U.N. emergency shelters. Ten thousand homes have been completely destroyed, 30,000 homes partially wrecked. Meanwhile, 64 Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza, three civilians in Israel.
We go now to Jerusalem, where we’re joined by Christopher Gunness, spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
Can you talk about the devastation on the ground right now in Gaza, Chris?
CHRISTOPHER GUNNESS: Look, it’s devastation which is both physical and emotional. What we’re seeing physically, you’ve seen on your TV sets. And unfortunately, we need to get scores of site engineers out into the field before I can make an empirical determination and tell you exactly how many homes have been destroyed, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence. And the fact that people are leaving our shelters, going out and then coming back suggests that they’re going back to destroyed homes. And don’t forget, these were homes they were told to leave, in leaflets that were dropped by the Israeli army. Well, it now would appear, at least from this anecdotal evidence, that a lot of those homes—and we estimate the homes of about 10,000 people—have been destroyed or damaged. So, we’re now in a situation where this catastrophic human displacement crisis is morphing into something equally disturbing for us, which is a huge homelessness crisis.
Panel members said phone data had limited role preventing terrorism in testimony before Senate judiciary committee
- Spencer Ackermanin Washington
- com,Tuesday 14 January 2014 21.44 GMT
excerpt…
The members of president Barack Obama’s surveillance review panel on Tuesday rejected some of the central contentions offered by the National Security Agency for its bulk collection of phone records, including the program’s potential usefulness in preventing the 9/11 attacks.
Testifying before the Senate judiciary committee, members of the panel said that restricting the NSA is necessary in order to rebalance the competing values of liberty and security.
Richard Clarke, who was the White House’s counter-terrorism czar on 9/11, echoed the 9/11 Commission in saying that the biggest obstacle to preventing the terrorist attack was not the NSA collecting an insufficient amount of data, but a failure to share information already collected.
“If the information that the federal agencies had at the time had been shared among the agencies, then one of them, the FBI, could have gone to the Fisa Court and could have in a very timely manner gotten a warrant to monitor” US-based al-Qaida conspirators, Clarke told the Senate judiciary committee…
British Psychological Society research digest:
‘You’ve probably experienced this. You’re in the middle of telling your friend a story when his eyes flick across to his phone. Perhaps he even picks it up, checks the screen. “Sorry, go on,” he says. But your flow is interrupted. And you know his mind is at least half elsewhere.
Shalini Misra and her team approached 100 pairs of people (109 women; average age 33) in cafes across Washington DC and neighbouring districts. They asked them to chat for ten minutes at a table in the cafe about a trivial topic (plastic festive trees) or about the most meaningful events of the past year. For each pair, the researchers observed from a discreet distance and checked whether either party put a mobile device on the table, or held one in their hand. After ten minutes was up, each person in each pair was asked to fill out a few questionnaires about the conversation and their partner.
Feelings of “interconnectedness” (rated by agreement with statements like “I felt close to my conversation partner”) were reduced for pairs in which a mobile device was placed on the table or held by one of them. Similarly, “empathetic concern” (measured by items like “To what extent did your conversation partner make an effort to understand your thoughts and feelings about the topic you discussed?”) was rated lower by pairs in which a mobile device was brought into view. The topic of conversation made no difference to these results, but the reduction in empathetic concern associated with the presence of a mobile device was especially pronounced for pairs of people who were in closer relationships, perhaps because their expectations about the interaction were higher…’
::: click on through to the results @ BPS research digest :::
August 2014
… assault on Gaza; Egypt’s workers struggle on; Syria’s new artists in exile; IT,
how much for your data? rise of the web documentary;
Piketty in the light of Marx; Latin America’s very modern coups;
Balkans, hope after the rains, Algeria’s frustrated youth;
Vietnam’s Costa del Cam Ranh;
Gabriel Garcia Marquezr emembered …
::: click cover to access :::
Russia has lost contact with its only missile detection satellite in geostationary orbit above the US. The satellite was originally supposed to operate until at least 2017, but began malfunctioning shortly after its launch in 2012. Russia still has two remaining missile detection satellites in elliptical orbits around the planet, but they are reportedly able to monitor US missile activity …click story for more @ the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute
:::::::: <<< >>> ::::::::
What is the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute?
The Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI) is a nonprofit think tank working on the topic of global catastrophic risk. GCRI was founded in 2011 by Seth Baum and Tony Barrett. GCRI is geographically decentralized, meaning that it has no central headquarters and its affiliates are located in many places. GCRI works with researchers from many academic disciplines and professionals from many sectors.
As of July 2013, GCRI is a project of the fiscal sponsorship organization Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs.
George Monbiot’s SPERI Annual Lecture, hosted by the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, 2014.
‘…If we surrender to the financial agenda and say, “This market-led neoliberalism thing is the way forward,” then we shift social values. Environmentalists are among the last lines of defence against the gradual societal shift towards extrinsic values. If we don’t stand up and say, “We do not share those values, our values are intrinsic values. We care about people. We care about the natural world. We are embedded in our communities and the people around us and we want to protect them, not just ourselves. We are not going to be selfish. This isn’t about money”, who else is going to do it?’
“And I know that you will agree with me that standing up for Australia also means standing up for the God, who has so blessed our land. I believe this country hungers for a spiritual revival. I believe it longs to see traditional values reflected in public policy again.”
ERIC(K) ABETZ, Address to the Australian Christian Lobby Conference, Brisbane, May 2013.
Palestinian death toll exceeds 1,000, medics say
More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Gaza conflict, according to Palestinian medical officials.
The news comes as foreign ministers from seven nations called for an extension of the 12-hour ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, according to Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister.
“All of us call on the parties to extend the military ceasefire that is currently underway,” Mr Fabius told reporters, following a meeting that included the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Qatar, Germany, Italy, Turkey and the United States.
Israel’s military pledged to hold fire for 12 hours from 8am (0500 GMT), but will continue searching for tunnels used by militants. The Islamist group Hamas, which dominates Gaza, said that all Palestinian factions would adhere by the short ceasefire.
Meanwhile, Gaza health officials said rescue workers have so far gathered 40 bodies from under rubble since the truce started. Eighteen members of a family died from tank shelling near Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip shortly before the ceasefire begun, the Gaza Health Ministry stated.
Hatred as violence spreads to West Bank – video
25 July 2014
Is this the start of the third intifada?
25 July 2014
Recommended Reading
- Gaza conflict: 12-hour truce as deaths top 900 bbc.co.uk
- Gaza crisis: Israelis and Palestinians observe 12-hour cease theguardian.com
July 22, 2014 |
On last night’s Daily Show, every time Jon Stewart uttered the word “Israel,” his team of correspondents started to yell at him. “Self-hating Jew!” one screamed in his face.
“Obviously there are many strong opinions on this issue,” Stewart said. “But just merely mentioning Israel or questioning in any way the effectiveness or humanity of Israel’s policies is not the same thing as being pro-Hamas.”
Watch below:
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A deleted social media post by a separatist militia leader has led to accusations that pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine are to blame for the Malaysia Airlines crash that has left at least 295 people dead.
Igor Girkin, who also goes by the nom de guerre Strelkov, is reported to have claimed that his forces shot down a plane in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine at 5.50pm (GMT+4), shortly before reports emerged the passenger jet was missing.
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Australia is pursuing draconian measures to deter people without visas from entering the country by boat.
In doing so, it is failing in its obligation under international accords to protect refugees fleeing persecution.
The New York Times, July 2014.
艺术界 LEAP : 27 INTRO…’In this issue’s cover feature we see artists in rural Beijing in the mid-1990s employing queerness as means to further marginalize themselves, and with others in the past couple years, to stand out among their peers and predecessors. Yet given the paucity of queer art and artists here at home, we also look beyond these borders: Douglas Crimp walks us through the queer heyday of 1970s New York, Travis Jeppesen peers into the queer gaze of experimental film elsewhere in Asia, and Cosmin Costinas and Chantal Wong elucidate issues of sexuality in Hong Kong and their roots in race and urbanization. Finally, we examine queer art on the Mainland, only to discover that sometimes, appearances deceive. Bisecting these four articles are a peppering of artworks from Jaanus Samma, Wu Tsang, Wang Taocheng, and Trevor Yeung…
Filling out the middle section of the magazine are two features on rising young artists Qiu Xiaofei and He Xiangyu. What we see in the practice of Qiu is both a reverence for and avoidance of the past that in the present find a rational reconciliation by way of the artist’s granting greater autonomy to the canvas. He Xiangyu, meanwhile, distances himself from his previously “big” art, returning to inner reality and bringing painting, sensation, and the body together on the same plane.
In the top section of the magazine, we recount the Art Basel Hong Kong Salon “The Gift of Tongues,” wherein LEAP deputy editor-in-chief Einar Engström set out together with curators Pauline J. Yao and Anthony Yung to delineate the intersections of art and language as seen, and heard, in the practices of Chow Chun Fai and Xu Tan…’
More footage emerges from the Sri Lankan civil war, but this time, journalist Callum Macrae says, it is “amongst the worst I have ever seen.”
The footage appears to show Sri Lankan soldiers sexually violating the dead bodies of female Tamil Tiger fighters. In two cases the dead have serious head wounds – possibly a sign that they were executed.
Ahead of the UN Human Rights Council vote, Channel 4 News also aired an interview with a Sri Lankan doctor, who stayed in Sri Lanka’s “No Fire Zone” at the end of the civil war to care for the injured.
He was imprisoned at the end of the war, and, he says, offered his freedom if he agreed to deny that human rights violations had been carried out by the Sri Lankan military.
Now free, he told Channel 4 News of the horror of trying to care for the wounded elderly and women, as food and medical supplies ran out and the government shelled hospitals.
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‘I cried every day’: inside Sri Lanka’s ‘No Fire Zones’
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His protégée Rebekah Brooks may have been spared, but the mogul faces a police grilling, more possible charges against News Corp from Scotland Yard, and a looming US Senate probe…
When Rupert Murdoch flew into London as the phone-hacking allegations exploded in 2011, he was asked for his top priority. “This one,” he said, gesturing at Rebekah Brooks. He got his wish this week when she was spared by a jury, but Murdoch is expected back in the city to face dozens of new burning priorities, many of which threaten to diminish or even destroy his newspaper empire.
It can now be reported that the FBI has copies of at least 80,000 emails taken from the servers at News Corp in New York. These messages, including those sent up the chain of command by Brooks, were not part of the mass deletion that was ordered in London when it became clear that police officers were soon going to be searching for evidence of a vast criminal conspiracy…
:::: more @ the Daily Beast :::
Here @ the interpretOr, we condemn Abbott Junta’s disingenuous use of other descriptors re OCCUPIED Palestinian Territory…
Below are recent reports by the UN Secretary-General, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Secretariat:
Much more available @the UN’s dedicated Occupied Palestinian Territory section of their site …
This is a record of a supposed ‘native title’ meeting staged by the iron ore miner, Fortescue Metals Group (FMG).
ps. greetings to our Washington DC based followers – Hisham, Nancy, Eric, Jonathan F, Dan, Bob G. et al…Good luck with the Abbott Junta invasion…we’d rather not have him back…any room for him @ Guantanamo?
- The proposed $7 GP co-payment will discourage many Indigenous people from accessing health care, especially preventative checks. This will have a significant impact on long-term health outcomes. Community health clinics have indicated that they will try to absorb the cost rather than pass it on to clients, but this will effectively cut funding from frontline services.
- The pension age will be raised to 70, whereas the life expectancy of an Indigenous man is 69.
- This is a clear example of a “universal” measure systematically disadvantaging Aboriginal people – (more @ the Conversation – see Blogroll)
Current issue: June 2014
… Ukraine, behind the barricades;Israel/Palestine, talks fail, can sanctions work?Latin America, all eyes to the left; Hungary’s turn to the Orient; Japan, islanders against nuclear; TTIP 7-page special report; World Cup, forgetting the fans; counting the cost of sleep; it ain’t what you say… and more…
::: just click cover shot to access :::
Frame grab shows an NBC News Exclusive interview with Brian Williams and Edward Snowden, excerpted from the May 28, 2014 TV primetime special. (AFP Photo / NBC NEWS / Handout)
“…You know, and this is a key question that the 9/11 Commission considered. And what they found, in the post-mortem, when they looked at all of the classified intelligence from all of the different intelligence agencies, they found that we had all of the information we needed as an intelligence community, as a classified sector, as the national defense of the United States to detect this plot,” Snowden said. “We actually had records of the phone calls from the United States and out. The CIA knew who these guys were. The problem was not that we weren’t collecting information, it wasn’t that we didn’t have enough dots, it wasn’t that we didn’t have a haystack, it was that we did not understand the haystack that we have…”
With the disappearance of an airplane high up in its skies the mysterious region that is Southeast Asia re-appeared in our line of sight. Have we also lost touch with the complex world of art from this region? The forms Southeast Asian art takes reveal feelings familiar to Chinese artists: contempt for bureaucracy, tension with Western contemporary art rhetoric, a reluctant embrace of and distance to quotidian social reality, and a sidestepping around modernist painting.
In this issue’s cover feature, we invite leading scholars from the region to elucidate these peculiarities and others: art historian T.K. Sabapathy recalls four seminal art happenings from the 1970s; David Teh proposes a rubric for video art; Zineng Wang offers an overview of ethnic Chinese painters; Iola Lenzi delineates the roots of conceptual art; and Alia Swastika considers the governance of Singapore over a contemporary art otherwise informed by a densely plural cultural context.
For this issue’s artist feature, Fang Tze-Hsu peeks behind the screen of Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s practice, which since 2009 has gradually generated work less and less narrative in nature. This issue also sees the introduction of our new experimental and alternative features, here discussing the state of street art in Hong Kong, the Treasure Hill movement in Taipei, and the latest instant-auction craze in the Mainland.
::: simply click cover shot for more 艺术界 LEAP 26 :::
#BustTheBudget (the Australian Greens)
For young people: If you have finished study but don’t have a job you must wait 6 months before you can get any income support. Then for 6 months you will be made to work 25 hours per week for the dole and then at the end of 6 months you will be cut off and left with no income once again.
If you need to see a doctor: Australia will no longer have universal healthcare and instead you will be forced to pay a $7 co-payment If you are a student: $4.2billion has been cut from students or university funding
If you are looking forward to the old age pension: You will now need to wait until you are 70 years old
If you are a single parent: Your payment will be reduced even further…
Public schools, the environment, the ABC and SBS, and public servants have all also taken a hit.
But you don’t need to sit back and take it. You can take action to stop Tony Abbott’s brutal budget.
| Download the #BustTheBudget petition |
A direct consequence of Rupert Murdoch installing a former News Ltd employee as PM of Australia, is that we the people are being harassed, berated and bullied by a sneering, lying, balding, misogynist, monarchist called Tony, who has just handed down a budget so draconian that it would make even a Thatcherite blush.
We the people are being royally screwed by this Murdoch-minion and his cabinet of reptilian sociopaths. To add insult to injury, these faux moralising conservative thugs are parroting Murdoch mantras, such as that old chestnut, THE AGE OF ENTITLEMENT IS OVER!
Well, Rupert Murdoch could be tasting a bloody great dose of his own medicine in the not too distant, as United States Government Accountability Office, (GAO), lifts the lid on some pretty questionable entitlements of his own…
United States Government Accountability Office, (GAO):
Highlights of GAO-09-157, a report to Financial Privacy Jurisdictions
INTERNATIONAL TAXATION
Large U.S. Corporations and Federal Contractors with
Subsidiaries in Jurisdictions Listed as Tax Havens.
Number and location(s) of subsidiaries in jurisdictions
listed as tax havens or financial privacy jurisdictions:
News Corporation
Belize (1), Bermuda (1), British Virgin Islands (62), Cayman Islands (33),
Cyprus (1), Hong Kong (21), Ireland (1), Latvia (4), Luxembourg (4), Marshall Islands (1), Mauritius (15), Panama (1), Singapore (5), Switzerland (2)
‘…the Abbott government’s first budget is in a category of its own. The nation is reeling as people come to terms with the extent to which the Prime Minister has shafted and lied to people and lead those who believed in him like lambs to the slaughter. Before the recent Western Australian Senate election I said at the Press Club that people were frightened by the Prime Minister because they didn’t know what he would do next or who he really is, what he really believes in. But now the real nature of the chameleon has been revealed…
…It is breathtaking to watch the Prime Minister and his cigar-smoking Treasurer, together with their hand-picked commissioners of audit, aided and abetted by the Murdoch press, try to con the community into believing that everyone has a moral obligation to share the burden of a confected crisis, arguing that the burden is being shared fairly whilst making absolutely sure that the full weight is carried by those who have no power to fight back-the young, the sick, pensioners, students and those least able to shoulder it, not to mention the natural environment and future generations. If you are privileged, the Liberals will protect that privilege; if you are already struggling, they will stamp you down and make your life harder. Prime Minister Abbott, your heroes, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, would have been proud of you.’
Chrsitine Milne is Leader of the Australian Greens ::: click here for more on this story :::
Sam Wainwright, Socialist Alliance councillor for the City of Fremantle, via Green Left Weekly:
“This mob were always going to introduce a budget like this. The question is — how seriously are we going to fight it? The Victorian Trades Hall has called a mass meeting and demonstration, which is a good start. This has to happen in every town and city. This is the time for some serious resistance, not a token demo and then, ‘That’s it. We’ve done all we can.’
“If the government is intent on taking us down the path of austerity like we’ve seen in Europe, then we need to build a movement of resistance like that in Spain and France, where millions of people have mobilised against austerity.
“I think the Greens are wrong to support an increase in a regressive tax like the fuel levy, as it hurts the poorest while doing little for the environment. At the same time, they have announced they will oppose the deficit levy on high income earners. While this is a temporary and inadequate measure, it is still a more progressive tax.
“When you read that the top 75 earners in Australia paid no tax, you start to see where the revenue crisis really lies. We need to remove regressive taxes (especially the GST) and increase the top marginal rate and company tax.
“If the Greens are serious about resisting these attacks, they should commit to blocking the budget in the Senate, as should the ALP.
“Unless we can push the government back now, the budget won’t be the end of the pain. Worker’s rights and entitlements, including penalty rates are next. A full-bench decision by Fair Work Australia on May 14 means that hospitality workers will have their penalty rates cut by 25% now. Following a review of the Fair Work Act amendments due out in June this year, and the Productivity Commission inquiry, due to report to the government in April next year, further attacks on workers and penalty rates are a certainty.
Budget day may well have been the best day of Hockey’s life, but it’s up to us to make sure the feeling doesn’t last.”
::: click here for ‘The movement to stop the war on the poor’ @ Green Left Weekly :::
Australia’s deafening silence on series of Murdoch-Abbott meetings…
Master Tony had enjoyed such a wonderful time playing kings and queens, knights and dames with his super new friends, William and Kathee…why, his pa Rupert and dearest uncle, Sir David Flounce O.A.P. , had pulled off a really ripping Easter hols!!! Hoooorahhhh!!! Hip, hip!!!
Look, they uhmm…they came all the way to see meee, all the way to see meee fwom London in Engulund!!! Weee had gwate fun and me and William wrestled and played games…I want, I want lots of castles and servants…I want servants and banquets and horseys and army people, just like William…and, and, and a, a , a crown…a big, big crown when I gwow up!!!
Tony was so excited…he and his mate snotty-Scotty put on the soldier-dress-up-stuff that William had left them as a parting gift and headed back out into the playground…
“Come on Tony, come on quick!!! Quick..” snorted snotty-Scotty… “I can see some stwange childwennn that are, yeuchhhh….who are not from here…they’re howible…’nd weally, weally stwange and stinky….let’s get them!!! Chaaaarge!!!”
Tony thinks that Scotty is really big and tough and that he is brilliant at scaring off poohy strangers…He remembers the big, loud aeroplanes from the recent fly-pasts, too…
Wait for me, Scotty, I’ve got my planes…my aeroplanes are the best…the best in the whole world ever…I wanna do more airplanes…neeeyahhhh, uuuuuuu….uuuu…aiwoplayyyyynzzzz…and, and, and dwop bombs on them…those nasty weirdos…haha-hahahahhh…Myyyy daddd…my dad’s told me that I can play Top Gun with $26,000,000,000 of ordinary peoples’ stupid old money!!! So there.
T.B.C…
Chief UN investigator of North Korean human rights abuses, Michael Kirby, discusses the allegations of crimes against humanity:
North Korea is truly a totalitarian state … It is not content to take control of the physical lives of the citizens, it has to intrude into their way of thinking, into their attitudes to government … [It implements] the system of characterising citizens according to their loyalty to the government and the party. This is truly a state without any real equivalent in the modern world.
Michael Kirby
The UN-mandated inquiry team says the country’s leadership should be hauled before at the International Criminal Court:
…the inquiry found that pregnant women are starved, while their babies are fed rats and snakes; more than 100,000 people are in gulags; there is systematic torture; everyone is forced to inform on each other; entire communities are denied adequate food; and the bodies of the dead are burned and then used for fertiliser.
The commission of inquiry says all abuses have been sanctioned and enforced by the government of Kim Jong-un….
the interpretOr 