"PS 752 was identified by one of the air defense units as a threat and targeted consequently."

"[The air defense unit operator notified command about the object and identified it as a threat. But command never responded and never let the unit operator know that it was the Kyiv-bound flight.] Another link in the chain of events was formed at this point."

"If at this point he had identified the target as a passenger aircraft, the missile would not have been launched. [Having not heard back from command, the air defense unit operator fired upon the target. He wasn't supposed to do that; Iran's military procedure states that individual units aren't authorized to fire without explicitly getting orders to do so.] The fourth link leading to the firing of the missile was now formed."

"The aircraft then kept hitting the ground and bouncing on a route towards the airport, making the aircraft pieces, victims' properties, objects and body remains disintegrate completely in a vast area near a residential complex, recreational and sports park, gardens and the surrounding agricultural land." 

"The sequence of events clearly shows the occurrence of a chain of events initiated by a human error."

Iran's Civil Aviation Organization report

Rescue teams examine the wreckage of the Ukrainian airliner that was shot down shortly after takeoff in the Iranian capital, Tehran, on Jan. 8. Iran says a tragic series of mistakes led to the missile strike. Akbar Tavakoli/IRNA/AFP via Getty Images

"The Ukrainian side expects from Iran a draft technical report on the circumstances of the aircraft shooting down."

"This situation is especially unacceptable, since we are talking about the fate of innocent people."

Oleh Nikolenko, spokesman, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry

"Canada and the other members of the International Coordination and Response Group (CG) are taking a co-ordinated approach to obtaining reparations from Iran, which includes not only compensation for the families but also an accounting of the events that led to the tragic result."

"[No negotiations or meetings between Iran and the other countries have been held and] "no formal offers have been made by Iran to the CG countries."

François-Philippe Champagne, Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs

Iran's president says $150,000 US will be paid for each victim on board Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, which was shot down nearly a year ago. But some families in Canada, still pushing for justice, say they won't accept the compensation   CBC

"What Iran is doing is humiliating and insulting to the families."

"We need to know the truth and we need to see the criminals in an impartial independent court like [the United Nations] International Court of Justice, We are done with Iran's actions."

"Now it is our government's turn to act and react. To take the investigation from them and take them to the court."

"The families are vigilant and will not sign any document. The murderer cannot play the role of mourner."

Hamed Esmaeilion, Iranian-Canadian, spokesman, Association of Victims' Families

When a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps operating an air defence unit near Tehran airport, shooting two missiles at a Ukrainian passenger jet carrying 176 passengers and crew in the belief it was an incoming missile targeting Iran in response to rocket fire the IRGC sent into Iraq to hit U.S. military bases there after the missile-targeted assassination of IRGC commander Qasem Solomeini a week earlier, Tehran denied it had anything to do with the downed aircraft where all aboard perished in a ball of fire.

The crash killed dozens of Canadian citizens and permanent residents, along with other Iranians who were students studying at Canadian universities. The largest proportion of those who died in the crash had connections to Canada, either as Canadian citizens, permanent residents or Iranian academics or students studying abroad. Among the dead were Ukrainians (the crew), Afghans, Britains, Swedes. Of the 167 passengers, 82 were Iranian, 63 Canadians; 138 people were en route to Canada via Ukraine.

Ukraine responded to Iran's cabinet allocating $150,000 to each family of the 176 victims of the passenger plane shot down in Iranian airspace last January, describing the handling of the situation from start to finish as "unacceptable"; from its original obfuscation and denials of facts and evidence to its interminable delays in handing over the retrieved black boxes for interpretation, to its initial reports exonerating the government for a 'mistake' made by an IRGC corps member.

"The cabinet approved the provision of $150,000 or the equivalent in euros as soon as possible to the families and survivors of each of the victims of the Ukrainian plane crash", announced the IRNA official news agency report. Ukraine is furious at the unilateral action without negotiating with the victims' families, much less the lack of action in bringing to justice those responsible for the tragedy. Compensation should be set through talks in reflection of international standards, emphasizes the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry.

According to Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh, an indictment is set to be issued within the month against "those whose negligence caused the accident", as reported by the semi-official news agency Fars. A military court has been handling the case. Iran's Civil Aviation Organization in a preliminary report released in July blamed a misaligned radar system and poor communication between the air defence operator and his commanders, resulting in the shooting down of the plane. 

Under rules set by the United Nations, overall control of the investigation is retained by Iran, with the United States and Ukraine accredited as the countries the jet was built and operated within, respectively. Canada has acted as the lead connection between the investigation proceedings and the families in Canada. Canada has played a surprisingly low-key role in the entire investigation proceedings, given the number of Canadian nationals who were killed by Iranian negligence.

Iranian-born Canadian Habib Haghjoo who lost a daughter and granddaughter in the crash stated his distrust of any news coming out of Tehran, stressing his priority is the content of the report and its purpose: "They [Iran] want to wrap it up. We want the truth".

"Iranian airspace was left open and Iran’s skies were alive with civilian flights throughout the time that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was lobbing rockets at U.S. targets in Iraq in retaliation for Washington’s drone strike on IRGC major-general Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s terror-exporting Quds Force."

"A recorded conversation between a Canadian victim’s relative and the Iranian senior investigator, Hassan Rezaeifar – a conversation that might be best described as a threatening phone call from the regime – contains what can only be understood as Rezaeifar’s candid admission that Iranian airspace was deliberately left open to conceal the IRGC’s retaliatory missile strikes on American targets. This would place the victims aboard Flight PS752 in the role of human shields. This was no human error. And the IRGC is effectively controlling Iran’s investigation into what happened."

Terry Glavin, Journalist, The Ottawa Citizen

Ryan Pourjam, 13, son of Mansour Pourjam, speaks last January about his father during a ceremony at Carleton University to honour Pourjam, a biology alumnus, and biology PhD student Fareed Arasteh, who died in the shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 in Tehran. Photo by Justin Tang /THE CANADIAN PRESS

Canada's COVID Financial Rescue Response

"The policies of the government in power, and the proclivities of the current prime minister, are not particularly oriented toward the hard work of generating economic growth, and that can make things difficult for the Department of Finance."

"Budgets used to be budgets. They were always political documents, but they were also built around the numbers and some explanation of those numbers."

"It's a lack of discipline and a lack of focus on actually delivering. You send out a press release and that's seen as the end game, whereas the real issue is in actually governing."

David Dodge, former Deputy Minister of Finance, 1992 - 1997

 

"One of the things we've seen throughout the past decades in government is the trend toward more control in the Prime Minister's Office."

"Actually, it can be traced as far back as my father [Pierre E.Trudeau, the 'Northern Magus'], who kicked it off in the first place."

"And I think we've reached the end point on that."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, pre-2015 election -- promises, promises

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, right, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

"The lack of transparency around the government's intentions in its economic and fiscal forecast is not acceptable in a democracy."

"I think everyone should be concerned about this."

Don Drummond, formerly Department of Finance 

"I think the Finance Department has been a bit diminished in terms of its positioning in the city and its power base -- not just recently but starting under [former Prime Minister Stephen Harper] Harper."

Scott Clark, Deputy Minister of Finance, 1998 -- 2001

"There is always a tendency to yearn for the good old days."

"People have been complaining about the centralization of power in the Prime Minister's Office since at least Trudeau senior."

Jennifer Robson, professor, national finance, Carleton University

An empty store up for rent is seen on Montreal's Sainte-Catherine Street, on Monday, June 8, 2020. Nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the government has yet to reveal where billions of dollars in pandemic aid has gone. (Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press)

 

According to Dr. Robson, claims of a diminished Department of Finance seem to compare current circumstances to the early- and mid-1990s when the Chretien government listened to the department. And the reason for that was the Chretien government's Minister of Finance, Paul Martin, had resolved it was past time to have the country balance its budget and clear away its deficit at a time when debt costs were six times the current rate, a time when Canada's bonds were being ignored by investment funds.

This was when Canada saw austerity budgets when the Prime Minister's Office and the Finance Department were in lock-step agreement. The country has returned to huge deficits and a burgeoning national debt occasioned by spending decisions made by the current Prime Minister, agreed to by the reigning Minister of Finance, and made manageable only because interests rates continue flat. Canada has outspent its G20 counterparts by a large margin in COVID-relief social programs with no end in sight, and little oversight.

Moreover, a government that promised time and again that its decision-making would be taken in an entirely visible manner, accountable for all actions, explanations available through fully transparent accounts. In reality what has transpired is a completely opaque situation, with former senior Finance officials deploring the unacceptably opaque actions of the Trudeau government. Officials describe an increasingly centralized power base resulting in the Prime Minister's Office capturing full authority not to be questioned or challenged.

 

And while some level of disagreement has been traditional between the PMO whose decisions are based on political considerations and the fiscally staid Department of Finance whose position of sober second thought was meant to guide the government, the current situation vastly transcends traditional differences that have been slight and manageable. The current government's position is a reflection of its leadership's focus on progressive social activism with policies revolving around redistribution, questions of economic balance irrelevant.

 

The grating lack of accountability surrounding spending measures has given heartburn to economists and former executives of the Ministry of Finance. The current Finance Minister tabled a fiscal update at the end of November promising between $70 billion and $100 billion in stimulus spending over three years, declining to detail where any of the outgoing extravaganza in funding would be directed. No fiscal anchor has been provided since the pandemic struck; no indication of how or when the government may rein in emergency spending allocated for COVID.

 

Following the Finance Minister's update an entirely new package of spending was announced; $15 billion in subsidies targeted to guide Canada toward exceeding its climate targets. The U.K. and Australia, among other developed economies, have tabled budgets during the pandemic, while Canada's government has provided high-level spending in two fiscal 'snapshots'. The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau continues to float costly and evidently permanent measures to "build back better".

 

"Their ability to push back against dumb ideas, or to ask where the money is going to come from, has gone out the window", commented one former finance officials on the condition of anonymity. 

 

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre says that, nine months into the pandemic, it's time for the government to tell Canadians more about where the money has gone. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

"[There is] an enormous transparency gap [when if comes to what the Canadian and the U.S. governments have revealed about where the money has gone — a gap the government should be pushed to close]."

"We should know more where that money is going. These are tens and tens of billions of dollars in business supports. It's a key part of the overall stimulus."

"And not knowing really ... reduces our ability to understand how these programs are working and what role can they play in terms of supporting the economic recovery going forward."

Former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page, now CEO, Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy, University of Ottawa

Falling Afoul of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

"The condition of her coming out [of prison] is something I'm worried about."

"It's completely hypocritical. [bin Salman's] rationale has always been that he wants to be seen as the giver of social reforms and he doesn't want other people to be able to take credit or steal the limelight."

"Canada is not a big player when it comes to the Saudi economic trade relationship. The experience of 2018 taught us that our allies didn't have our back."

Bessma Momani, senior fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation, political scientist, University of Waterloo

"Ms. [Hathloul] has courageously and selflessly dedicated her life to advocating for human rights and campaigning to advance women's rights in her home country of Saudi Arabia."

"She is an exemplar of UBC's commitment to  free speech, equality, empowerment and education and global citizenship and an unwavering champion of advancing a just and equitable society."

Santa Ono, president, University of British Columbia

"We understand that early release is possible and advocate for it."

"True to our democratic values and principles, Canada will always stand with human rights activists and defenders around the world."

Spokesperson, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Canada

 

"My sister is not a terrorist, she is an activist."

"To be sentenced for her activism for the very reforms that MbS [Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman] and the Saudi Kingdom so proudly tout is the ultimate hypocrisy."

Lina Hathloul

• 

  Loujain al-Hathloul, a Saudi women's rights activist has been sentenced to prison.

 

"Loujain al-Hathloul has already spent 900 days in detention, during which she endured torture, sexual harassment and other forms of ill-treatment, was held in solitary confinement and denied access to her family."

Heba Morayef, regional director, Middle East and North Africa, Amnesty International

When eventually 31-year-old Iranian social and equality-rights activist is released from the Saudi jail where she was imprisoned in 2018, accused and charged with "conspiring against the kingdom", and spying, she will tell all, whether, as charged, she was subjected to waterboarding, flogging and sexual assault, as Amnesty International claims. Not that there is much doubt that this hasn't happened to the young woman, a graduate of the University of British Columbia. She was arrested along with several other women activists on charges of conspiracy and spying.

When that news reached Canada, the then-minister of foreign affairs took to Twitter relaying a message of Canada's disapproval, demanding that the women be released forthwith. A crude gambit at the very least, an off-the-cuff comment of outrage, completely at variance with normal avenues of government-to-government diplomacy and discreet, non-public overtures from one government to another. A method by which matters can be settled and outcomes satisfactorily obtained.

Predictably Saudi Arabia lashed back at this sloppy criticism of an internal matter, irrespective of how outrageous the issue was and in the end, because Canada officially erred, relations between it and Saudi Arabia declined immediately, leaving Canada with no leverage at all to make diplomatic overtures on behalf of Ms.al-Hathloul's release. She has now been sentenced to six years in prison, the very place where she has suffered intolerable abuse of her human rights and dignity as a woman.

The Kingdom's Specialized Criminal Court sentenced the young woman to five years and eight months' incarceration. With credit for time served and a suspension of the final two years on appeal plus 10 months of the sentence it is possible she might be given a conditional release in March of 2021. At the time that Canada's minister of foreign affairs Chrystia Freeland tweeted her personal opinion of arresting women activists and human rights supporters, the kingdom reacted by expelling Canada's ambassador, suspending trade and investment and threatening to withdraw all Saudi nationals studying in Canada. 

 

And nothing whatever was accomplished to gain Ms. al-Hathloul's freedom. What's more, in recognition of Canada's bungling lapse in diplomacy none of its allies saw fit to express their support at the fix Canada found itself in, being punished for its very public interference in another country's affairs. Allies from the United States to France and Britain and Germany said nothing in Canada's defence. 

 

Canada had strayed so far out of the confines of diplomatic relations there was no defence that could be offered; it had effectively defused its potential effectiveness in discreetly discussing the matter, government-to-government, disqualifying itself by default from influencing the outcome of the young woman's untenable situation.

Loujain al-Hathloul graduated in 2014 from UBC with a Bachelor of Arts degree, rising to prominence when she publicly began campaigning for the right of women in Saudi Arabia to be autonomous-acting human beings, including the right to drive a car. When the sentence was announced, according to Ms.Hathloul's sister Lina, she broke down crying and intends to appeal. Both rights groups and her family speak of abuse including electric shocks, waterboarding flogging and sexual assault, all of which Saudi authorities deny.

Saudi newspapers reported that according to the judge Ms.Hathloul confessed to the crimes with no coercion taking place. On the other hand, last year Ms.Hathloul had refused to rescind her allegations of torture in exchange for an early release, according to her family, an allegation that a Saudi judge dismissed last week.

• 

  This Nov. 30, 2014 image made from video released by Loujain al-Hathloul, shows her driving towards the United Arab Emirates - Saudi Arabia border before her arrest on Dec. 1, 2014, in Saudi Arabia. (AP Photo/Loujain al-Hathloul, File)

  
  

Beijing Playing Prison Warden on the World Stage

"You may have a very small chance of being the one they decide to detain, but it's years of your life."

"I have lots and lots of friends and relatives in China, as well as a business. But I feel like it's just not worth the risk."

"[The company has however compartmentalized information to protect the organization on the ground], because you never know what can be construed in the wrong way."

"We’ve become very careful about that sort of thing [unintentionally arousing Beijing's ire, and facing arbitrary detention in China]. And we didn’t used to be."

Anne Stevenson-Yang, co-founder J Capital Research, Northeast U.S.

"Beijing's record of detaining individuals in retaliation for the perceived transgression of their home government should be a geopolitical risk on the radar of every C-suite executive."

Hugo Brennan, Asia analyst, risk consultancy firm Verisk Maplecroft

"We have received calls from member companies about the possibility of arbitrary detention."

"Our view is that the risk is small, but it's not zero."

Ker Gibbs, president, American Chamber of Commerce, Shanghai

 

"It works because, while it is shocking, deeply harmful for the detainee and places enormous political pressure on the foreign government, it is also judged by foreigners as sufficiently rare as to be a manageable risk, something that doesn’t really disrupt profitable business for China."

David Mulroney, former Canadian ambassador to China

Increasingly, Westerners with business interests in China are beginning to reassess the risks of travel to a country that has increasingly made use of 'detention diplomacy' to register its displeasure with other countries' attitudes toward Beijing's policies and behaviour and specifically that of the Chinese Communist Party ruling elite. Business executives now consider the risk of being carried off by security agents in China, to become yet another casualty of geopolitical tensions that have emerged between Beijing and the West, most specifically the United States.

The arbitrary detention and charging of two Canadians with espionage and endangering the security of China when they were taken into custody in 2018 following hard on the detention of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou on an extradition warrant by the United States which saw the RCMP arrest Ms.Meng at a stopover at Vancouver International Airport in December of that year appears to have initiated a new strategy for China, of coercive diplomacy.

Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor remain imprisoned, subject to human rights violations imposed by the CCP, including denial of access to a lawyer, while Meng Wanzhou is free on bail to live in her two luxury Vancouver mansions while her extradition case winds its way through the court in accordance with Canadian and international law. Since the detention of the two Michaels other countries have had to deal with their nationals taken into detention in China, Australia among them. 

This new way of 'influencing' and demanding the attention of other countries to China's growing clout through the world community has not endeared it to the countries being targeted who also have raised the issue of human rights violations with respect to Chinese Uyghurs' detention and brain-washing, and Beijing's hard-handed anti-democracy clamp-down of Hong Kong, along with its threats to Taiwan, added to Beijing's assertion of rights-of-possession in the South China Sea and its territorial aggression against India.

Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research has realized riveting reservations around returning to China to advance her business interests as research director of her company, prepared now to give up her frequent business trips to China. The risk of being taken in by security agents and imprisoned on charges having nothing in relation to reality fails to appeal to her sense of self-preservation. She and her husband and children moved to the U.S. six years ago from China, now she fears the risk of returning for any reason, personal or business.

A dozen executives, diplomats, consultants and academics have given their opinions in interviews, asking their names be withheld for security purposes, many of them believing an increased risk in travel to China will instruct them in future plans to avoid making themselves vulnerable, with the potential of ending up in prison. Passage of a security law in Hong Kong has failed to reassure that China's closed justice system can be relied upon to mete out justice, as it were. 

Police, prosecutors and courts are known to hew the Communist Party line. Under Chinese law authorities are able to arrest 'suspects' and maintain incarceration for prolonged periods without trial under the newer and increasingly wide-ranging national security laws. Chinese citizen Haze Fan, a Bloomberg News staffer, was recently detained in Beijing with China confirming that she is being held by the Beijing Municipal National Security Bureau on suspicion of 'endangering national security', but authorities refuse to release details of her case. Mostly, without doubt, since there are none.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp representing the largest chipmaker in China was placed by the Trump administration on a blacklist along with over 60 other Chinese companies, leading the Chinese Ministry of Commerce to threaten retaliation to the move denying Chinese companies access to American technology, from software to circuitry. A move that has increasingly soured China on all relations with Western sources. 

China maintains it is being maligned by the label of "hostage diplomacy", being "totally groundless". No one, they stress, who respects the law of the land would have any reason to fear arrest. In turn Chinese executives express concern at the visit of spokeswoman Hua Chunying, U.S. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman this month, claiming Meng Wanzhou's arrest to be "100 percent a political incident". Zhao Lijian, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman hinted political intervention lifting proceedings against Meng "could open up space for resolution to the situation" of the two Canadian Michaels.

Data on eight categories of "coercive measures" was compiled in a recent report produced by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute noting actions such as those Beijing has embarked upon have sharply risen in the past few years through arbitrary detention, execution, popular boycotts, pressure on specific companies, state-issued threats and restrictions on official travel, investment, trade and tourism. Beijing's novel initiatives on how to make friends and influence countries.

"I know a lot of business people who are out of China now and are very afraid of going back", one executive asking for anonymity, stated; he and others, in particular former government officials working as consultants have become increasingly wary. The U.S. State Department warned American citizens they face risk of arbitrary arrest and exit bans; to avoid unnecessary travel to China -- and the Canadian Foreign Affairs department has issued a like warning. Little wonder relations are frayed.

The Panopticon Is Already Heren  The Atlantic

Xi Jinping is using artificial intelligence to enhance his government’s totalitarian control—and he’s exporting this technology to regimes around the globe.

When Life Isn't Life

"You executed the defenseless Mr. S. in a cowardly way. Unlike you, he didn't retreat into his childhood bedroom — he worked, he enjoyed football, he got qualifications."

'[You are a loner living in your childhood bedroom at the age of 27, soaking up] crude conspiracy theories [on the internet and building weapons]."

"You are a danger to humanity [showing no remorse and when in court only repeated] absurd [ideology]."

"You are a fanatical, ideologically motivated lone perpetrator. You are anti-Semitic and xenophobic."

"You showed no indication of remorse. On the contrary, you repeatedly made clear that you wanted to continue your fight."

"Consequently, we have decided that society must be protected from you."

Judge Ursula Mertens, regional court, Hlle, Germany

 

"The verdict makes clear that murderous hatred of Jews meets with no tolerance." 

"Up to the end, the attacker showed no remorse, but kept to his hate-filled anti-Semitic and racist world view."

Josef Shuster, head, Germany’s Central Council of Jews

 

"None of the hate-filled conspiracies that this man has voiced are new."

"We’ve heard them all before. And we know where they lead. We know what happens when this propaganda and this speech goes unchecked."

"Germany knows it. I know it."

Talya Feldman, synagogue attack survivor

Accused Stephan Balliet stands in the courtroom of the regional court at the beginning of the trial in Magdeburg, Germany, Tuesday, July 21, 2020. (Hendrik Schmidt/dpa via AP)

"Inmates live in rooms and sleep in beds, not on concrete or steel slabs with thin padding. They have privacy -- correctional officers knock before entering. Prisoners wear their own clothes, and can decorate their space as they wish. They cook their own meals, are paid more for their work and have opportunities to visit family, learn skills and gain education."

"[The cells are] more like dorm rooms at a liberal arts college than the steel and concrete boxes most U.S. prisoners call home."

Visiting American Justice and Corrections authorities, Vice

This is a description of the German penal system accommodation for federal prisoners sentenced to prison for any number of serious crimes against society, including murder. A similar type of confinement and opportunities in a 'humane' prison system can be found in Norway.  German law has it that the purpose of criminal confinement is a method that leads to rehabilitation. The theory being that someone has gone temporarily astray in psychotic acts against society's best interests and must be gently led back to their natural inclination to live in peace and solidarity with other citizens of Germany.

 

Mourners outside the door of the synagogue in Halle, Germany, last year.Credit...Jens Schlueter/Getty Images

This is called forward-looking liberal penology. Advanced nations of the world sympathizing with the plight of the pathologically criminal element among them, the sociopaths and the psychopaths; viewing them all as salvageable, to return them to a pacific state of psychological well-being and acceptance of their role in a well-oiled society through acts of kind solicitation for their welfare. The victims, on the other hand, must accept that those who sinned against them were momentarily bereft of their senses and are deserving of rehabilitation, not ongoing punishment.

Take the case of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right extremist who killed 8 people with a bomb and later shot 69 other people -- including many teens -- dead on a island nearby Oslo in July of 2011, serving Norway's maximum sentence of 21 years. He was given a room of his own with all the comforts that German prisons offer, but attempted to sue the state arguing that strict conditions imposed upon him through isolation violated his human rights. 

 

Eligible to seek parole after serving the first ten years of his sentence term of 21 years in July 2021, it will be left to the courts to make the determination whether such a release is appropriate. "I have at his demand sent a request for parole. This is a right that all prisoners have and that he wants to use", said his lawyer, Oeystein Storrvik. "I feel quite safe that the Norwegian judicial system will do the right thing", tweeted Vegard Wennesland, a survivor of the attack on Utoeya island.

 

In Germany on Monday a regional court imposed the most extreme penalty available; life imprisonment for Jew-hater Stephan Balliet who last year on Yom Kippur in the city of Halle attempted to storm a synagogue to shoot to death the 51 congregants gathered within to pray. A special budget exists for the protection of synagogues through the German federation but no special precautions for Yom Kippur, the solemn Day of Atonement had been taken. The synagogue, however, had installed a thick wood entrance capable of withstanding a violent onslaught.

The synagogue's locked gate and CCTV system were all that stood between the attacker and worshippers inside

 

Determined to gain entrance while the Jewish congregants watched on security cameras as he shot repeatedly at the door without success Bailliet shot to death a 20-year-old woman passing by then rampaged through a kebab shop nearby where he confronted and shot to death a disabled 20-year-old man who begged for his life. He wounded two other people before he fled the scene. He was outside Halle when police caught up to him and confiscated a camera mounted on a helmet that recorded his actions which he obviously meant to post on social media.

Most criminals who stand trial in Germany are treated to a 'faint hope' protocol. And most of those who received "life" sentences become parole-eligible in 15 years. And lucky man, rehabilitation efforts are in his future, hope not denied the man whose plan was to slaughter as many Jews as he could manage. His punishment won't be hard to take for a man who lived as a recluse, with an increasing number of German states permitting restricted internet access for prisoners.

What is so very fascinating is that Germany is concerned with quality of life for its malefactors, with offering them a rainbow of hope for their futures; yes, they may be incarcerated for unspeakable crimes but all is not lost, they are given the opportunity to reclaim their futures by accommodating themselves to the penal authorities' efforts to lead them toward repentance and rehabilitation. This is the same nation that saw fit a lifetime ago to incarcerate Jews en masse in ghettoes preparatory to sending them to forced labour, gas chambers and death.

But at the present time, judges sitting in an atmosphere of liberal penology insist that the penalty for a crime must not be without limits much less absolute, where the potential for diminished sentences exist, crimes of horrendous nature not excluded. Whereas judges during the period of the Third Reich officially stamped their approval over the removal of citizenship and human rights for Germany's Jews, agreeing them to be sub-human, a pestilence upon the nation.

In December 1959, two members of the Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP) right-wing extremist party painted swastikas and the words "Germans demand: Jews out" on the synagogue in Cologne. Anti-Semitic graffiti emerged across the country. The perpetrators were convicted, and the Bundestag passed a law against "incitement of the people," which remains on the books to this day.

The Gift of Remembrance : Renouncing God : Holocaust Tourism

"In the summer of 2017, I took my family -- my wife and six of our nine children, ages eight to 22 -- on a trip to hell. Rather than tour the beautiful sites of Europe, our mission was to explore the darkest places in Jewish history. Where Adolf Hitler was born, where he and his aides had formulated the Final Solution, where Nazis had ghettoized, deported and exterminated six million Jews and where the last remnants of Eastern European Jewry subsist."

"I'd been watching this tragedy slowly fade into the background of our collective consciousness. A modern, not an ancient, catastrophe, and yet the last witnesses were dying off. A year earlier, my friend and mentor Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, was lost to us, too. People were losing a connection to the most important object lesson, the greatest evil, that history had ever shown us. It was becoming academic, a question for films and books, not something told in the anguished voices of tormented victims. And as a matter of mere history, it was becoming obscure."

Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Los Angeles, California

Elie Wiesel, visiting Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem in 1986, stands in front of a photo of himself (bottom right corner) and other inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. (Sven Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images)

"I am forced to stretch out my hands and to beg. ... Fathers and mothers, give me your children ... I must carry out this difficult and bloody operation, I must cut off limbs in order to save the body!"

"I must take away children, [imploring ghetto parents to hand over their children for deportation and slaughter] and if I do not, others too will be taken, God forbid."

Head, Jewish Council of Elders Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, Lodz Ghetto, Poland

Yad Vashem ... Mordechai Rumkowski speaking to a crowd in the Lodz Ghetto, Poland, June 15, 1940

"It [Tykoein, Polish shtetl now a museum with a synagogue dating to 1642] was like a ghost town. It hurt because all the stories I grew up with about the shtetl of course acknowledged that there were persecutions and pogroms. But they were framed within an overall context of close-knit and passionate Jewish life."

"The Jewish baker, the Jewish butcher, the Rabbi, the Synagogue, the Jewish market. The whole shtetl coming together every Shabbos for community prayers."

"Here, there was nothing. You get there and you're like, 'Where are all these people'? Oh, they were taken to a forest and shot. I remember thinking, 'Wow, all these happy moments came to an end, and I'm standing here at that end'."

"We are here to remember the 1.5 million children of the Holocaust even if it leaves us incensed at God. We're here becquse the six million don't want to be forgotten."

Shaina Boteach, 22, post-family-European trip to Holocaust sites

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and his family at Treblinka, a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. (Courtesy of the family)

 

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany released findings from their 2018 study that informed the public of the fact that 11 percent of the adult American public and 22 percent of millennials had not heard or were uncertain they had heard of the Holocaust; 31 percent of adults and 41 percent of millennials believed two million Jews or fewer had been killed; while 41 percent of adults and 66 percent of millennials were unable to identify Auschwitz as a Nazi extermination camp.

Rabbi Boteach cites these numbers as the impetus for his decision to travel to Europe with the younger of his children for the express purpose of seeking out sites in Europe ineradicably linked to the Holocaust. To confer upon them the gift of a lasting memory. To refresh, replenish and restore while enlarging whatever they had learned up to the time of their departure of the momentous disaster that extinguished the lives of six million Jews. While the population of Germany knew absolutely nothing of what was transpiring.

And while the world looked on, unbelieving that a plot so diabolically nefarious, so wide-spread, so without protest at the inhumanity of the lead-up to the carefully engineered plan to destroy an uncountable number of lives by first degrading them as human, likening them to a global disease, a pestilence, so that tormenting them in public, demeaning, threatening, violating their human rights would arouse no particular backlash among Germans, even as disinterested Europe looked on with boredom, no governments and their populations sufficiently invested to react.

Rabbi Boteach would teach his family a lesson in history that would have sticking power; none of his children would forget what their own eyes witnessed, what their ancestry boded, what modern history would retch up for posterity. What he hadn't reckoned on was that exposure to the sites where these atrocities and links to them took place did impact on his impressionable children a bit of the immediacy of the horror, but nothing, no after-effect exposure could come close to the degradation and despair those who lived it felt.

At a memorial in Budapest, iron shoes represent Jews who were shot and thrown into the Danube River during World War II. (Peter Kohalmi/AFP/Getty Images)

 

His children would be left haunted by what they had seen with the links to the horrors, indelibly marking them for life. But who is to say that other children guided by their parents at a remove in exposure to the deliberate eradication of European Jewry and the global inaction in response to open genocide would not be similarly haunted, retaining those facts, circumstances and realities throughout their lives? The decision was his to make and his children's to bear. And after the fact, he second-guesses his choice.

Impacted by his children's wavering in their belief of an Almighty, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. Other than God chose to go off duty at that time in history, to set aside his omnipotence and just allow humanity to prove what it is capable of. So, it's a tossup, did the decision to expose his children directly to the sites and haunting visions of Europe's surrender of its Jews to an ideology of genocidal hatred accomplish what he meant it to, or did it move his children to denounce God's absence and absent him from their lives? And which scenario would disturb him as a failure of his intent?

Three of the Boteach family's eldest children failed to accompany their parents on this tour of Europe's dismal failure as a civilization. He describes them as being 'conversant in Jewish history'. Would that be insufficient, necessitating direct exposure to historical sites of colossal, well-earned infamy? He acknowledges that his younger children accompanying him would have "wanted to have more fun", and assuredly fun and Holocaust redux do not match.

 

The Boteach family outside the Reichstag, home of Germany's parliament, in Berlin. (Courtesy of the family)

Once arrived in Germany they headed for Wannsee, where the planning was initiated to launch the mass murder of Europe's Jews. His children were, in his description "horrified and riveted". It is a horrifying and riveting reality, reactions they would have expressed being informed of the situation while remaining at home. Rabbi Boteach speaks of the dissonance of visiting a concentration camp during the day and a movie at night. Yes, that might be incongruous, but the latter is far more judicious for children than hauling them to the remains of a concentration camp.

He describes his children's unease at the arrival of a German high school group with a guide at the site, while understanding the need for young Germans to be exposed to their history. At home. And after that Wannsee trip the recommendation by an Israeli security guard accompanying an American Jewish group at the major Holocaust memorial in Berlin suggesting they remove their yarmulkes to avoid the risk of assault, and his refusal to do so.

His partial sympathy with his youngest child who begged "don't make me spend my ninth birthday in Birkenau", leading to his decision to take the family to the Lodz ghetto instead where over 245,000 Polish Jews had been caged until they were finally eradicated. The birthday girl was presented with Polish dumplings from a nearby kosher kitchen takeout which failed to cheer her up while they hunted for the precise location where the-then ghetto head appealed to parents to surrender their children to be murdered so they could work for the Nazi war effort and be themselves (temporarily) spared.

Afterward the birthday girl informed her father before bed that this would be a birthday she would never forget. He will himself perhaps never forget his 19=year-old daughter having "a crisis of faith". She felt overwhelmed with emotion and said: "How can you still believe in God after seeing Dachau and all the other horrible places?"

Three years after that fated trip with his family, he reconsiders: "In Vienna, we should have seen a Mozart or Strauss concert. In Warsaw, we should have visited the shops. In Krakow, we should have seen the Wawei Castle. At times, my kids thought me obsessed and mad." As a good father, sensitive to the needs of his children, he claims not to have taken them on that journey to hell "because I thought it would make them more empathetic or humble. I've always wanted my kids to have happy childhoods and sought to protect them from unnecessary trauma".

Precisely. Will he ever realize that the trip was his, was for him,  not for his children, all of whom he has with perhaps good intentions, traumatized...?

German troops carrying a Nazi flag enter the Polish town of Lodz on Oct. 9, 1939. Over the next several years, almost all of the city's Jews were sent to concentration camps where they perished. (Paramount News/Pool/AP)

Ethically Challenged Canadian Corporate CEOs Double-Dipping on the Taxpayer's Dime

"The orthodoxy is that executives owning shares is absolutely the proper corporate governance because it aligns the philosophy, the risk and the performance period with payouts."

"What's interesting is that when you bring dividends into play and the ability of an organization to determine dividend payouts based on a government subsidy, it does raise questions about that linkage and the optics of that linkage."

"By the time you actually own a physical share, it's considered an after-tax investment the same way it would be if you bought mutual funds [there has never been a requirement to directly disclose figures relating to dividend payouts publicly]."

Christopher Chen, managing director, Compensation Governance Partners

 

"You may be less willing to suspend dividends because you have an interest in receiving the dividends. To say [CEWS] is different money or the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing I don't think addresses that conflict that certain CEOs have seven digits in dividends at the same time they're accepting the government subsidy."

"What you could do is voluntarily take a haircut so your net total compensation remains the same ... and say we're not going to benefit financially during receipt of taxpayer money."

Richard Leblanc, York University professor, governance consultant

There is nothing illegal about companies claiming emergency benefits while continuing to pay dividends. But the findings raise all kinds of questions that are worth debating. Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post files

There may be nothing illegal, strictly speaking about wealthy corporations lining up to receive government benefits out of taxes imposed on citizens, during the economic hardships of SARS-CoV-2 causing a global pandemic, but that is only because the government in its haste to send out cheques to individuals and corporations claiming to have been deleteriously impacted by the pandemic, in a bid to soften the blow and give aid to those in need, overlooked cautionary principles in flux when greed equals need, and failed to specify certain conditions be met to qualify for the handouts.

That wealthy corporate interests have taken advantage of the situation claiming Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy benefits to enable them to meet payrolls and avoid laying off personnel, when in fact they faced questionable such emergency reactions to the COVID situation, speaks volumes of their lack of principle and perspective. Seeking to enrich themselves at the expense of the taxpayer may be a common enough human lapse in judgement but it hardly excuses them, and nor does it earn any plaudits for government either.

An investigative report by journalists at one of Canada's leading national newspapers revealed that the chief executive officers of 68 Canadian companies that proceeded to pay out dividends to their shareholders while at the same time taking possession of the special pandemic wage subsidy, saw those same executives earning an estimated $30 million in dividends personally during the quarters where their firms accepted the wage subsidy.

The investigation revealed a minimum of 68 companies receiving over $1 billion in CEWS, designed as a subsidy giving aid to companies seeing a revenue drop due to the coronavirus impact -- to enable them to cover payroll costs, and who then chose to nonetheless pay out over $5 billion in total to shareholder dividends in the past two quarters. Nothing in the CEWS program as it was designed prevents companies from paying out those dividends.

 

Toronto's financial district is seen on Friday. CBC News analyzed the financial statements of 53 public companies that disclosed receiving more than $10 million from the Canada emergency wage subsidy program. Collectively, these companies dished out nearly $2 billion to shareholders between April and September. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)

 

 

Pierre Karl Peladeau of Quebecor, known to be close to the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, earned close to half of the group's total in shareholder dividends personally, estimated at $14 million. K.Rai Sahi, CEO of four companies on the investigated list earned $3.1 million in dividends, with his company receiving over $22 million in CEWS payments. Quebecor claimed its telecom business failed to qualify for CEWS while its media subsidiaries did. 

 

According to Christopher Chen, companies have made it a requirement that executives own shares for the past several decades, as the gold standard of good governance, but the dividend earnings of the executives now has him rethinking a practise once taken for granted. Government to date has paid out over $52 billion to 359,880 applicants through the CEWS program, extended recently to June 2021.

Millions were received by other CEOs on the list of dividend recipients.

 

York University professor Richard Leblanc stated executives owning shares has always represented a "small-c" conflict of interest for the fact that the executives and board members deciding what gets paid out in dividends may themselves be recognized as among the largest beneficiaries of those payments.  The issue of dividends is characterized by many companies as necessary, arguing their dividends represent stability for investors. Suspending paying out dividends, they argue, would break the cycle of trust and might lead to a stock price downturn.

As Frank Li from the Ivey Business School explains, an executive's compensation should be linked to the firm's performance but when funds like CEWS become introduced into a company, injected into revenue and net income figures they tend to exaggerate performance metrics. This leads to higher compensation while facilitating payouts like dividends, in other words 'compensating' CEOs at taxpayers' expense. It is "luck or taxpayer money" that has resulted in executives collecting dividend income, not that they succeeded in leading their companies to good financial outcomes.

"If you perform badly, then you are fired, but in this case, they performed badly, they received [CEWS] and executives still enjoy high pay and high compensation."

"That's not an efficient corporate governance mechanism."

Frank Li, finance professor, Ivey Business School, Western University

 

 

The Bearer of Bad News

"Against this backdrop of rising infections, rising hospitalizations and rising numbers of people dying from coronavirus, it is  absolutely vital that we act."

"We simply cannot have the kind of Christmas that we all yearn for."

"This virus [a new mutation of COVID-19 appearing in South Africa] is highly concerning because it is yet more transmissible and appears to have mutated further than the new variant that's been discovered in the U.K." 

"Thanks to the impressive genomic capability of the South Africans, we’ve detected two cases of another new variant of coronavirus here in the UK."

"Both are contacts of cases who have travelled from South Africa over the past few weeks."

"This new variant [from South Africa] is highly concerning, because it is yet more transmissible, and it appears to have mutated further than the new variant that has been discovered in the UK."

British Health Minister Matt Hancock

 

"[The new variant in the UK] is very different to the variant in South Africa, it’s got different mutations."

"Both of them look like they’re more transmissible. We have more evidence on the transmission for the UK variant because we’ve been studying that with great detail with academic partners. We’re still learning about the South African variant."

:[Vaccines that have already been developed should be effective] because the vaccine produces a strong immune response and it’s broad and acts against lots of variation in the virus."

Susan Hopkins from Public Health England

There is no current evidence to suggest that the new variant is affected any differently by vaccines  Reuters

The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 appears incorrigibly immune to every human-inspired effort to bring it under control. The virus almost appears to taunt scientific efforts to better understand its viral properties, much less to invent new protocols that might have the effect of diminishing its predatory advances. All viruses mutate over time; it is why vaccines produced annually for the seasonal flu can only partially address all the altered elements of any season's flu virus; the vaccine producers wait until the last possible moment to assess as accurately as possible all of the most current flu viruses' qualities before finalizing their vaccine for distribution for that year.

Experts were aware of a number of SARS-CoV-2 mutations, tracking them and evaluating their effects. The two issues of greater infectability and more potentially serious effects of infection uppermost concerns. At least one of those concerns has now been realized in a new strain that has hugely accelerated infectiousness in the U.K. Authorities are trying to cope, just at a time when it was hoped that measures could be eased for the holiday season; instead areas of high infection have had to return to lockdown.

 

The UK has now been effectively placed in quarantine by the international community.’ The closed ferry terminal at Dover. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

 

Countries in Europe and North America and Asia have closed off flights and other modes of travel from Britain in light of the current situation; the nightmare of all countries already coping with desperate numbers of infections, hospitalizations and deaths is an exacerbation caused by another viral strain brought in from an outside source. Ironically, Britain, struggling to contain its own mutant strain, now realizes that an even more seriously infectious mutant strain has already infiltrated the country, one that originated in South Africa.

Leading to huge swaths of Britain being placed under strict COVID-19 restrictions responding to a highly infectious virus variant now sweeping the country, raising infection cases to record levels. Almost 40,000 new infections of the mutated variant of the coronavirus, estimated to be up to 70 percent more transmissible, has been responsible for case numbers and hospitalizations to soar. Deaths, numbering 744, also represents the highest figure since April.

London, southeast England and Wales are now seeing tight social mixing restrictions, reversing plans to ease curbs over Christmas across the nation. From December 26, additional parts of southern England are set to be among those added to the highest level of social mixing restrictions where 16 million already have been placed in Tier 4 restrictions. Those parts of the country locked into lower tiers are also slated to face tighter curbs.

 

Passengers wait in line at the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras International, amidst the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in London [Hannah McKay/Reuters

 

Nearly everyone in Scotland and Northern Ireland has seen their governments announce entire populations to be subjected to the highest level of restrictions following Christmas. On average, according to the health minister, 1,909 COVID hospital admissions take place every day, with 18,943 people in hospital with the virus at the present time, levels rivalling the situation in April when the coronavirus took Europe by storm.

All this, and coincidentally the discovery by British scientists of another, more virulent variant having arrived leading Britain to place new restrictions on visitors from South Africa, calling on those who recently had been in the country or in contact with anyone recently arrived, to self-isolate immediately. The public being assured that all such measures are temporary until such time as officials are better able to understand the variant and what it portends.

Last week, officials in South Africa announced the detection of a  new variant by their scientists, appearing to be fuelling a rapid rise in infections in the country. Now, even as Britain is grappling with a steadily increasing outbreak linked to a variant originating in England, they must as well turn their attention to a South African variant. One, Minister Hancock announced, that might be more contagious even than the U.K. variant, both of which are "out of control" in the country.

People walk and cycle in London [Hannah McKay/Reuters]