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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/12/2018 6:03:38 PM

US-Backed Coalition Just Slaughtered Dozens of Children Under 10-Years-Old by Bombing a Bus Full of Kids

AUGUST 9, 2018


By John Vibes

Through multiple Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, of Bush, Obama, and Trump, the United States military has been on a steady march of conquest throughout the Middle East and Africa. The cover story for so many years of nonstop military action has been “fighting terrorism” — but for anyone paying attention, it should be obvious that their true goal is empire building at the expense of innocent children.

US-backed bombings and terrorist rebel groups have made areas in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and other countries completely uninhabitable, causing an untold number of deaths and creating a massive refugee crisis. In recent years, the situation in Yemen has become increasingly dangerous and deadly, thanks to a US-Saudi led coalition which is bombing civilian targets in the country and created a blockade that has cut off millions of Yemeni people from the outside world.

This week, The Guardian reported that a brand new US-Saudi airstrike hit a civilian bus in northern Yemen killing at least 43 people, most of whom were children.

The International Committee of the Red Cross were stationed at a local hospital that worked to help the injured and identify the deceased.

Under international humanitarian law, civilians must be protected during conflict. Scores killed, even more injured, most under the age of 10,” Johannes Bruwer, of the ICRC Yemen delegation said.

Abdul-Ghani Nayeb, a health department chief in Sa’ada, told Reuters that 43 people were killed and at least 61 injured.

As usual, the perpetrators of this violence are claiming that they did nothing wrong and that they simply hit a military target. The civilians killed are merely considered collateral damage or a means to an end.

A statement released by the Saudi state press called the strike a “legitimate military action” and said that “[The airstrikes] conformed to international and humanitarian laws.”

The statement went on to accuse the victims of using children as human shields as if this somehow explains the large number of child casualties.

This attack is just one small incident in a much larger bombing campaign which has displaced over 50,500 households, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

“We’ve said this before and we are saying it again: parties to the conflict are obliged to do everything possible to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure. This is not a voluntary commitment, it is mandatory on all belligerents. So many people have died in Yemen – this conflict has to stop,” Lise Grande, the UN’s Yemen humanitarian coordinator, told The Guardian on Thursday.

The current situation in Yemen has become recognized by many experts as the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis. In addition to the constant bombing, the blockade of the country has led to a massive outbreak of cholera, a horrific illness that could be solved very easily if people just had access to clean water.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Yemen is in the midst of a cholera outbreak of “unprecedented scale.” In fact, this is the worst outbreak of its kind in recorded history.

A statement issued by UNICEF and WHO executive directors said:

This deadly cholera outbreak is the direct consequence of two years of heavy conflict. Collapsing health, water, and sanitation systems have cut off 14.5 million people from regular access to clean water and sanitation, increasing the ability of the disease to spread. Rising rates of malnutrition have weakened children’s health and made them more vulnerable to disease. An estimated 30,000 dedicated local health workers who play the largest role in ending this outbreak have not been paid their salaries for nearly 10 months.

Last week, the WHO warned of a new surge in illnesses, and asked for a ceasefire so clean water and medical workers could reach the ill and wounded.

“We’ve had two major waves of cholera epidemics in recent years and unfortunately the trend data that we’ve seen in the last days to weeks suggests that we may be on the cusp of the third major wave of cholera epidemics in Yemen. We’re calling on all parties to the conflict to act in accordance with international humanitarian law and to respect the request of the U.N. and international community for three full days of tranquillity and to lay down arms to allow us to vaccinate the civilian population for cholera,” WHO emergency response chief Peter Salama told reporters in Geneva.

Obviously, with news of fresh bombings this week, the coalition has no interest in agreeing to a ceasefire. This should come as no surprise considering the fact that the whole strategy behind a blockade is to create a humanitarian crisis.

John Vibes is an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. He also has a publishing company where he offers a censorship free platform for both fiction and non-fiction writers. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. John just won a 3-year-long battle with cancer, and will be working to help others through his experience, if you wish to contribute to his treatments consider subscribing to his podcast to support. This article first appeared at The Free Thought Project.Thought Project.


(activistpost.com)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/12/2018 6:44:07 PM

New evidence emerges of China forcing Muslims into ‘reeducation’ camps


Sayragul Sauytbay, 41, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national and former employee of the Chinese government who is accused of illegally crossing the border between the countries to join her family in Kazakhstan, sits in court during a hearing last month in the city of Zharkent, Kazakhstan. (Ruslan Pryanikov/AFP/Getty Images)

First-of-its-kind courtroom testimony here has corroborated allegations that the Chinese government has built a network of internment camps in western China where Muslim minorities are held without charge for “reeducation.”

Sayragul Sauytbay, an ethnic Kazakh Chinese national, said she crossed from China’s Xin­jiang region to Kazakhstan without proper papers after being forced to work at a camp where around 2,500 ethnic Kazakhs were being held for indoctrination.

“In China, they call it a political camp, but really it was a prison in the mountains,” she told a court last month packed with Kazakh villagers, reporters and a few tight-lipped Chinese diplomats.

Interviews by The Washington Post with 20 other people in Kazakhstan familiar with the experiences of ethnic Kazakhs in China, including three former detainees and more than a dozen people who say they believe a family member is in detention, provided similar accounts of the camps, with additional details.

Taken together, their statements provide new evidence of extralegal detention and forced indoctrination in Xinjiang, revealing how the government, which has been predominantly targeting ethnic Uighur Muslims, also is detaining members of other, mostly Muslim groups, including Kazakhs.

People who have recently arrived here from China told of villages with checkpoints and countless security cameras and scanners where those suspected of having foreign ties can be interrogated, held without charge and sent to “reeducation centers” indefinitely.

At these camps, Muslim minorities spend their days singing propaganda songs such as “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China,” and their nights in crowded cells, they said. One man released from a camp said he had been waterboarded.

In April, Laura Stone, acting U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for China, said at a briefing in Beijing that “at least” tens of thousands of Chinese Muslims are in detention. Experts at a July 26 hearingin Washington held by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China — a body created by Congress in 2000 with a legislative mandate to monitor human rights and rule of law — suggested the number could be hundreds of thousands or more.

Heather Nauert, a State Department spokeswoman, in April criticized “the increasing levels of repression in Xinjiang.” She said, “We are concerned about the widespread detentions and the unprecedented levels of surveillance.”

Chinese officials have repeatedly dodged questions about the internment allegations. At a July 23 hearing at the court in Zharkent, a Chinese diplomat declined to answer questions about Sauytbay’s case.

Asked to comment on The Post’s findings, specifically allegations of extralegal detention and torture, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a short statement.

“I only want to emphasize that at the moment, the overall situation of Xinjiang society is stable, the momentum of its economic development is good and ethnic groups live in harmony,” the statement read.

Sauytbay, who was in court on charges that she had entered Kazakhstan illegally, testified that she feared for her safety should she be deported back to China: “That I am discussing this camp in an open court means I am already revealing state secrets.”

A fraught history

Sauytbay grew up in Xinjiang’s far northwest, among ethnic ­Uighurs, Kyrgyz and some Han Chinese, according to her husband, Uali Islam.


Sauytbay’s husband, Uali Islam, and their daughter at his house in Baidibek, Kazakhstan. Islam had taken the couple’s son and daughter to live in Baidibek after officials in Xinjiang, where they used to live, began cracking down on Muslim minorities. (Izturgan Aldauev/For The Washington Post)

As children, they were educated in Kazakh and Chinese, but in the past decade, a government-led shift toward Chinese-language education meant their children are not totally comfortable in Kazakh, Islam said. That bothered the couple.

The fraught relationship between the Communist Party and Muslim minorities took a sharp turn for the worse when violence shook Urumqi, the regional capital, in 2009.

After attacks by Uighurs in the years that followed, the government declared a “people’s war” on terrorism, launching ever more stringent security measures.

“You cross from one road to another, and they check you again,” Islam said of their hometown.

Sauytbay, who had a government job in education, had her passport seized by local officials, her husband said. In recent years, some ethnic minorities in China have had their passports confiscated or been prevented from getting new passports, according to a report by Human Rights Watch and two interviewees.

In 2016, officials asked for the passports of Sauytbay’s husband and children, and they decided it was time to leave for Kazakhstan. Sauytbay would follow.

“She said, ‘I’m a woman and member of the Communist Party — they won’t do anything to me. Maybe things will settle down and I can join you,’ ” Islam recalled.

In early 2017, she told him, she was informed that she was being transferred to what was described to her as an “education center.” That spring, she arrived to see that it was actually an internment camp housing thousands of Kazakhs.

Sauytbay told her husband the “education” was “all about the party.” Guards locked everyone in a room, blasted propaganda from speakers and made them sing Communist Party songs.

Eventually, Sauytbay fled to Kazakhstan. “She said,” he recalled, “ ‘I came here; I saw my children — now I can die.’ ”


Islam looks through family photos at his home. His wife said the internment camp where she was held housed thousands of Kazakhs. (Izturgan Aldauev/For The Washington Post)
Detained without trial

A recent analysis by China Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group, found that, according to government data, 21 percent of criminal arrests in China last year took place in Xinjiang — even though the population is just 1.5 percent of the country’s total. Arrests jumped more than eightfold last year: from 27,404 in 2016 to an estimated 227,882 in 2017.

Those numbers do not include residents sent to the camps. Interviews here with separated families and former camp detainees indicate that detention without trial and mass internment are happening outside the penal system.

Kurmanjan Silam, 37, said her father, Madinam Silam, has been missing for months.

He was born in Xinjiang in 1948 and worked for the government for 40 years before becoming a resident of Kazakhstan, she said. This past spring, he was called back to his hometown to take care of some pension-
related paperwork.

She has not heard from him since. Her mother told her over the phone that her father had been taken for education. “She told me not to call back, not to look for him,” Kurmanjan Silam said.

Sapila Taqash said her 50-year-old son, Zheniskhan Baghdal, who works in entertainment, was taken from his home in Urumqi more than a year ago. “They said they found something on his phone and took him away,” she said.

She tried to find out when and how he was sentenced, only to conclude that there was no charge or trial.

“If he had been tried, I would have gotten a paper saying he was tried,” she said. “We don’t know the sentence, don’t even know if he is alive or not, or how he’s feeling. How has nobody seen him since?”

Akikat Kaliolla, 34, was born in Xinjiang, worked as a musician in Beijing and Shanghai but then moved to Kazakhstan and married.

After several earlier visits, his parents and both of his brothers came to Kazakhstan in June 2017 to celebrate his child’s first birthday, he said.

Now, he said, they have disappeared back in China. Relatives there won’t talk to him.

Amanzhan Seiituly was born in China but became a citizen of Kazakhstan, traveling back and forth between the countries for years.

He flew to Beijing in February for a business trip but was stopped at the airport and interrogated about his connections in Kazakhstan.

“They were asking everything about what I do in Kazakhstan: How many relatives in China? What do they do? Do they have houses? What do the houses cost? Do you have a car? What did it cost?”

After trying to escape, he was forced to fly to Xinjiang and was driven by police to his hometown, ostensibly to take care of paperwork, he said. He spent days at the local police station before being transferred, without trial, to a detention facility that officials called an education center, he said.

From there, he was taken to another camp, he said. Each day, inmates were forced to sit for hours and sing — “The Communist Party is good. The Communist Party is good,” as one refrain went.

His account was echoed by Orynbek Koxebek, who was released with him in March after spending months in various forms of detention.

Koxebek, who was born in China but is now a Kazakh citizen, said he returned to Xinjiang to see his parents and was called in by local authorities in November 2017 to discuss his citizenship paperwork.

He was interrogated, then sent for “reeducation” — in his case, literacy classes because he could not read or write Chinese.

Koxebek said, as well, that he was waterboarded. His was not the first allegation of torture in the camps: Another detainee previously interviewed by The Post, Kayrat Samarkand, said he had been strapped for hours to a device called the “tiger chair.”

The guards also taunted them, Koxebek said. “They told me, ‘If you don’t learn Chinese, you will be in prison for five years,’ ” he recalled. “I didn’t think I would ever be released.”

When he was, officials told him not to talk about what happened — and for months, he did not.

But over time he began to realize, he said, “somebody has to speak out.”

A Kazakh 'tightrope'

The detention of its citizens in China has forced Kazakhstan’s government to “walk a tightrope” between the demands of its people and the dictates of one of its most important trading partners, said Maya Wang, a Hong Kong-based China senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.

In May, Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had raised the subject with the Chinese side andcalled for the release of Kazakhs with dual citizenship.


Islam and his children hold signs last month calling for the release of his wife during her trial. On Aug. 1, a court ruled she will be reunited with her family, not deported back to China. (Izturgan Aldauev/For The Washington Post)

Coverage of Sauytbay’s trial led Zhang Wei, the Chinese consul general in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to make a rare public comment. “This year, we’ve noticed different individuals zealously campaigning about the so-called ‘problems of the ethnic Kazakhs from Xinjiang,’ ” he told local media.

“They’ve done this on the Internet and out in public, openly and secretly, inventing unfounded accusations with the evil intent of staining Xinjiang’s image, grossly interfering in China’s internal affairs and baselessly criticizing the Chinese government,” he said.

A judge disagreed.

On Aug. 1, after weeks of campaigning by activists, Sauytbay was released from custody and spared immediate deportation. Judge Dinara Quiqabaeva suspended Sauytbay’s six-month sentence because of the “exceptional circumstances” of her case.

Outside the courthouse, Sauytbay was mobbed by supporters shouting “Long live Kazakhstan!”

But her fight is not over. Beijing could still press for extradition, lawyers said.

And her family can’t forget what’s going on just across the border. “My parents are there. Her parents are there,” Islam said. “We spoke out here, so what is going to happen to them?”

Dinara Salieva contributed to this report.


(The Washington Post)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/13/2018 10:09:43 AM

Why two countries want to kill 100,000 beavers



Beavers are native to North America from the Canadian tundra-line to northern Mexico. After a misguided 1946 introduction, the rodents established robust populations in Argentina and Chile. (Ben Goldfarb)

If you’re a boreal toad — or a wood duck, or a brook trout, or a moose — you might owe your life to a beaver. (Kudos, also, on learning to read.)

Castor canadensis, the North American beaver, is the ultimate keystone species, that rare creature that supports an entire ecosystem. By building dams and forming ponds, beavers serve as bucktoothed housing developers, creating watery habitat for a menagerie of tenants. Songbirds nest in pondside willows, frogs breed in shallow canals, and trout shelter in cold pools. There’s even abeaver beetle that eats the skin of you-know-what.

Modern beavers have been wandering North America for 7.5 million years, giving flora and fauna plenty of time to adapt. Willow, a favorite snack, resprouts multiple stems when it’s gnawed down, like a hydra regrowing heads. Cottonwoods produce distasteful tannins to deter chewing. America’s rarest butterfly, the St. Francis Satyr, eats little but sedges that grow in beaver wetlands. The evolutionary connection runs so deep it’s often boiled down to a pithy bumper-sticker: “Beavers taught salmon to jump.”

Before European traders set about turning their furs into fancy hats, beavers roamed most of the continent, stopping up streams from the Arctic tundra-line to the Mojave Desert. But the mammals never ventured beyond northern Mexico, leaving Central and South America historically beaverless.

Until, that is, an ill-conceived scheme unleashed nature’s architects on a landscape that had never known their teeth — and forever rearranged ecosystems at the bottom of the world.

The bizarre experiment was launched in 1946, when Argentinarelocated 20 Canadian beavers to Tierra del Fuego, the windswept archipelago at South America’s tip, to “enrich” local wildlife and foster a fur trade. The pelt industry never took off, but the beavers, unchecked by North American predators like wolves and bears, flourished. They swam glacier-scoured fjords between islands, dispersing throughout both the Argentine and Chilean sides of Tierra del Fuego. Some decades after their arrival, a beaver clambered from an icy strait and established a beachhead on the Patagonian mainland. These days, their population numbers about 200,000.

And as beavers spread, they did what beavers are wont to do: They transformed their surroundings.

Just as New Zealand’s flightless birds had no recourse against invasive rats, Tierra del Fuego’s trees were ill-equipped to withstand “los castores.” The region’s forests are dominated by beeches that never evolved beaver coexistence strategies: They don’t resprout after cutting, produce unsavory chemicals or tolerate flooded soils. As beavers chewed down beeches and expanded free-flowing streams into broad ponds, forests opened into stump-dotted meadows. In 2009, Chris Anderson, an ecologist at Chile’s Universidad de Magallanes, found that beavers had reshaped up to 15 percent of Tierra del Fuego’s total land area and half its streams — “the largest alteration to the forested portion of this landscape since the recession of the last ice age.”

“Basically, everything that’s cuttable has been clear-cut,” Anderson said. Drowned trees and gnawed logs, freeze-dried by icy winds, litter the landscape like the ghosts of forests past. “You just see acres and acres of white trees.”

Conservationists, aghast at the loss of old-growth forest, put their faith in natural barriers. Patagonia has two primary habitats, the forest and the steppe — the latter a wind-blasted, arid grassland whose paucity of trees seemed likely to limit beavers’ growth. In 2017, however, an Argentine biologist named Alejandro Pietrik found that, contrary to predictions, beavers were actually producing moreoffspring on the steppe. Unbothered by the lack of trees, the colonists were happily weaving dams from a shrub called mata negra.

“As long as they have water, they can expand,” Pietrik said. “They can colonize all of Patagonia if they want.”

Over the years, Chile and Argentina have made halfhearted attempts at curtailing the invasion. A bounty program failed to motivate trappers, while proposed markets for beaver meat never materialized. Recently, though, the two nations have gotten more serious: In 2016, they announced a plan to cull 100,000 — one of the largest invasive-species-control projects ever attempted.

Although the massive trapping program, in a pilot phase, should help contain the spread, most scientists say the toothy loggers are in South America to stay. “I think eradication is not possible,” said Chilean biologist Giorgia Graells. On many islands, Graells said, dense forests and scarce roads will thwart trappers. If beavers persist on even a single island, she pointed out, the survivors could repopulate the rest of the archipelago — Sisyphus’s boulder in furry form.


By forming ponds and wetlands, beaver dams, like this one in New Mexico, provide habitat for species from moose to cutthroat trout to boreal toads. (Ben Goldfarb)

In some respects, the South American beaver narrative is a familiar one: Humans introduce nonnative species; nonnative species wreak havoc; humans futilely attempt to erase their error. Yet the beaver story is more interesting — for, befitting a keystone species, the rodent takeover has produced winners as well as losers. Research suggests that beavers have benefited native Magellanic woodpeckers, perhaps by making trees more susceptible to the wood-boring insects upon which the birds feast. The slackwaters behind dams also support native fish called puye, which are four times more abundant around beaver impoundments than elsewhere in southern Chile.

“Before you determine whether a change is good or bad, you always have to ask, ‘For whom?’ ” Anderson said. “If you’re a duck and you want ponds with lots of little crustaceans to eat, well, beaver ponds are full of them.”

The biggest beneficiaries, however, have been the beaver’s fellow North Americans: the muskrat and the mink, two other lusciously furred mammals the Chilean government naively plopped down in Tierra del Fuego in the 1940s. On their own, the imports might have perished; beavers, however, ensured their survival. When researchers scoured one invaded island, they found a whopping 97 percent of muskrat tracks, scats and burrows around beaver ponds and wetlands, suggesting that one rodent was supporting the other. Mink, a weasel-like carnivore, have in turn feasted on the muskrats — as well as native birds and mammals.

The scientists who studied that ecological chain reaction called it an “invasional meltdown.” A less ominous phrasing might be “novel ecosystem,” a natural community that’s been altered by human activity but has since escaped our control. Like it or not, novel ecosystems are all around us — scrubby pine forests in Puerto Rico, urban wetlands in New Jersey, replanted grasslands in an old Colorado mining pit. Assuming utter eradication fails, some corners of Patagonia may be forced to surrender to the awesome power of an indomitable rodent.

The whole saga, ultimately, is a sort of Bizarro Beaver story: The very same tree-gnawing, dam-building, pond-creating talents that normally make them such miracle-workers have mostly produced disaster below the equator. South America’s beavers are both charismatic and catastrophic, life-sustaining and forest-leveling, an invasive scourge and a popular tourist attraction. As thecompassionate conservation movement dawns, beavers pose, too, an ethical dilemma: How do we balance ecological health with animal welfare? Is the only solution really mass slaughter?

The paradoxes can’t help but affect the scientists studying Patagonia’s beavers, who admire the architects even as they desire to see them wiped out.

“We have to focus on the big picture, on the ecosystem level,” Pietrik said. “But it’s hard to think about beavers being eradicated. You relate to them in a way.”

Ben Goldfarb is an environmental journalist and the author of “Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.”

(The Washington Post)

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Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/13/2018 10:55:37 AM
Children are being euthanized in Belgium

Opinion writer

Deliberately taking a small child’s life is unlawful everywhere in the world, even when the child is terminally ill and asks a doctor to end his or her suffering once and for all.

There is an exception to this rule: Belgium. In 2014, that countryamended its law on euthanasia, already one of the most permissive in the world, authorizing doctors to terminate the life of a child, at any age, who makes the request.

For a year after the law passed, no one acted on it. Now, however, euthanasia for children in Belgium is no longer just a theoretical possibility.

Between Jan. 1, 2016, and Dec. 31, 2017, Belgian physicians gave lethal injections to three children under 18, according to a July 17 report from the commission that regulates euthanasia in Belgium.

The oldest of the three was 17; in that respect, Belgium was not unique, since the Netherlands permits euthanasia for children over 12.

Belgian doctors, however, also ended the lives of a 9-year-old and an 11-year-old. These were the first under-12 cases anywhere, Luc Proot, a member of the Belgian commission, told me in an interview.



Australian scientist David Goodall, who turned 104 years old last month, wishes to die. He plans to travel to Switzerland to undergo voluntary euthanasia.

Everywhere else in the world, the law reflects powerful human intuitions, moral and practical: that it is wrong to abandon hope for a person so early in life, no matter the illness; that it is absurd to grant ultimate medical autonomy to someone too young to vote or legally consent to sex; and that even the best-intentioned fallible human beings should not be entrusted with such life-and-death power.

In Belgium, a kind of libertarian technocracy has conquered these qualms. Euthanasia advocates insist that some children, even very young ones, may possess the same decisional capacity as some adults, and it’s therefore discriminatory to deny them the freedom to choose euthanasia based on an arbitrary age limit.

Meanwhile, Belgian law trusts experts to prevent mistakes or abuses. Doctors must verify that a child is “in a hopeless medical situation of constant and unbearable suffering that cannot be eased and which will cause death in the short term.” After a child makes his or her wish for euthanasia known, in writing, child psychiatrists conduct examinations, including, Proot told me, intelligence tests, to determine that the youngster is capable and “not influenced by a third party.” Parents can, however, prevent the request from being carried out.

Once any euthanasia — for a child or an adult — has occurred, a six-member commission examines the case file to make sure everything was done properly.

Medical privacy, however, limits what the commission can review. Names of patients and doctors are redacted. If concerns about the lawfulness of a procedure arise, the commission can vote to look at identifying information, but this rarely happens. (Most of Belgium’s4,337 euthanasias in 2016-2017 involved adults with cancer.) The commission’s public reports contain mainly overall statistics, with limited details of individual cases.

We do know the 11-year-old euthanized last year had cystic fibrosis. This congenital respiratory disease is incurable and fatal, but modern treatments enable many patients to enjoy high quality of life well into their 30s or even beyond. Median life expectancy for new CF cases in the United States is now 43 years, according to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Proot assured me that everything was in order, not only with the 11-year-old’s case but also with the other two: a 17-year-old with Duchenne muscular dystrophy and a 9-year-old with a brain tumor. “I saw mental and physical suffering so overwhelming that I thought we did a good thing,” he told me.

Proot was, of course, relying on reports by the anonymous physicians who participated in the euthanasias, and we, in turn, must take Proot at his word: Journalists and other members of the public are not permitted to review the case files independently, even in redacted form.

What, exactly, convinced doctors that these children’s cases were hopeless, that their deaths were imminent — and that the kids fully understood not only euthanasia but also the treatment options that might have alleviated their condition?

Such questions seem especially pertinent for Belgium, given the problems it has experienced since legislators allowed euthanasia for patients with cognitive and psychiatric illnesses, such as dementia, depression or schizophrenia, even if they have no terminal physical ailment.

Last year, a member of the euthanasia commission resigned in protest because it refused to recommend prosecution when a woman with dementia who had not requested euthanasia was nevertheless put to death at her family’s request.

Since then, 360 Belgian doctors, academics and others have signed a petition calling for tighter controls on euthanasia for psychiatric patients.

For now, however, the policy remains the same, and the Belgian public’s support for euthanasia remains undiminished. The precedent for euthanizing children has been established, and more will almost certainly receive lethal injections this year, next year and the year after that.

Read more from Charles Lane’s archive, follow him on Twitter orsubscribe to his updates on Facebook.


(The Washington Post)

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
8/13/2018 6:05:54 PM

Horrifying UN Report Details Widespread Child Rape by High-Level UN Employees

By Matt Agorist

A deeply disturbing report has finally been released by the United Nations detailing the rampant sexual exploitation of children by UN employees that is widespread, throughout multiple countries.

While pieces of the report were released previously, the full report, detailing the scope and horrifying nature of the abuse was only just released in July.

As Disobedient Media points out in a scathing report,

The publication of a summary version of the report caused a global furor in 2002, eventually leading to some policy changes. However, these efforts have proven woefully insufficient in light of ongoing scandals, including but not limited to the recent Oxfam debacle, the Zoe’s Ark scandal, allegations of horrific sexual abuse in the Central African Republic by UN forces, and the Laura Silsby incident. All of these cases (and many others) occurred after the partial publication of the UNHCR report, pointing to one unsavory conclusion:

Aid work is not a vehicle of charity, but is, in a very real sense, a cover for atrocity. It is a weapon, a blunt instrument of power that is wielded to exploit the most vulnerable populations in crisis around the world. We can now state that sentiment as fact, not opinion.

The report reads like a nightmare and states in part:

Agency workers from local and international NGOs as well as UN agencies are among the prime sexual exploiters of refugee children often using the very humanitarian assistance and services intended to benefit refugees as a tool of exploitation. Male national staff were reported to trade humanitarian commodities and services, including medication, oil, bulgur wheat, plastic sheeting, education courses, skills-training, school supplies etc., in exchange for sex with girls under 18. The practice appeared particularly pronounced in locations with significant and established aid programs.

There was compelling evidence of a chronic and entrenched pattern of this type of abuse in refugee camps in Guinea and Liberia in particular…The number of allegations documented, however, is a critical indicator of the scale of this problem as altogether 42 agencies and 67 individuals were implicated in this behavior…

Security and military forces including international and regional peacekeepers, national forces and police units are another significant category of exploiters. UN peacekeepers in Sierra Leone are alleged to be extensively involved in the sexual exploitation of children with the assessment team recording allegations against UNAMSIL peacekeepers from nine countries. Details of these allegations, which also require verification, have likewise been submitted to UNHCR.

The sex exploiters are men in the community with the money, power and influence: agency workers, peacekeepers, regional and national armed forces, teachers, police, businessmen, diamond miners, refugee leaders and logging company staff.

One would think that this 2002 report would have curtailed at least some of the abuse when a portion of it was publicly released at the time. However, that appears not to have happened. As TFTP reported earlier this year, an outright frightening dossier released by a former senior United Nations official revealed that United Nations employees have carried out over 60,000 rapes in just the last decade.What’s more, the dossier estimates that the organization currently employs at least 3,300 pedophiles.

In just ten years, under the guise of rendering aid, the United Nations has literally been raping and pillaging countries across the world. The problem has gotten so out of hand that it prompted the former UN insider, Andrew Macleod, to blow the whistle and hand over the evidence to Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) Secretary Priti Patel.

According to the exclusive report by the Sun, the dossier reveals that on top of the 3,300 pedophiles working for the organization, thousands more “predatory” sex abusers specifically target aid charity jobs to get close to vulnerable women and children.

According to Macleod, anyone who’s attempted to blow the whistle on the horrifyingly rampant abuse is silence and fired.

Sharing his dossier with The Sun, Prof MacLeod last night warned that the spiralling abuse scandal was on the same scale as the Catholic Church’s.

While the report reveals that there are 3,300 current employees who are active pedophiles on the UN’s payroll, Macleod estimates the real number to be far higher.

There are tens of thousands of aid workers around the world with paedophile tendencies,but if you wear a UNICEF T-shirt nobody will ask what you’re up to.

You have the impunity to do whatever you want.

It is endemic across the aid industry across the world.

The system is at fault, and should have stopped this years ago.

According to the report in the Sun:

Professor MacLeod worked as an aid boss for the UN all over the world, including high profile jobs in the Balkans, Rwanda and Pakistan – where he was chief of operations of the UN’s Emergency Coordination Centre.

He is campaigning for far tougher checks on aid workers in the field as well as the abusers among them to be brought to justice, and wants the UK to lead the fight.

The professor’s grim 60,000 figure is based on UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s admission last year that UN peacekeepers and civilian staff abused 311 victims in just one 12 month period over 2016.

The UN also admits that the likely true number of cases reported against its staff is double that, as figures outside of war zones are not centrally collated.

Prof MacLeod also estimates that only one in 10 of all rapes and assaults by UN staff are reported, as even in the UK the reporting rate is just 14 per cent.

Based on evidence from Prof MacLeod, ex-Cabinet minister Priti Patel – who resigned in November last year – this week accused senior officials at DFID of being part of the cover up.

“Child rape crimes are being inadvertently funded in part by United Kingdom tax-payer,” explained Macleod.

“I know there were a lot of discussions at senior levels of the United Nations about ‘something must be done’ but nothing effective came of it, and if you look at the record of whistleblowers, they were fired,” he said.

We are looking at a problem on the scale of the Catholic Church — if not bigger.

As the Free Thought Project has been reporting for years, none of these predators are ever held liable, and as this report shows, only the ones who expose it are fired.

In a blow to victims of human trafficking worldwide, a massive child sex ring was exposed in Haiti — involving international ‘peacekeepers’ with the United Nations as well as other high-level officials from around the world — and no one went to jail.

Perhaps it’s time we stop relying on the ones who keep getting caught raping children to stop people from raping children. A novel idea indeed.


(
activistpost.com)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)

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