[News] Around The Rest of World

A posting place for news from places around the globe, outside of the US/Europe.

I haven't posted here in a while, so let me fix that:

Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's presidential front-runner, stabbed at rally

A front-runner in Brazil's presidential election, Jair Bolsonaro, has been stabbed during a campaign rally.

The far-right politician was attacked in the midst of a crowd in the south-eastern state of Minas Gerais.

He underwent surgery for injuries to his intestines and is expected to recover, hospital officials said.

The controversial politician, who has outraged many in Brazil with racist and homophobic comments, has performed strongly in recent polls.

Polls suggest he would get the most votes in next month's presidential elections if former President Lula da Silva fails in his attempt to overturn a ban on him standing.

Far-right politician... front runner... great.
Stabbing is awful too obviously.

While the US is focused on Florence, the strongest storm of the year is about to hit the Philippines:

WP: Super Typhoon Mangkhut, 2018′s strongest storm, to slam into Philippines

The planet’s strongest storm in 2018, so far, is on a collision course with the Philippines. At least four times as intense as Hurricane Florence, Super Typhoon Mangkhut is expected to make landfall on the island of Luzon early Saturday, local time.

The typhoon, equivalent in strength to a Category 5 hurricane, contains sustained winds of more than 165 mph at its core, with gusts approaching 200 mph. Evacuations are ongoing in Cagayan, the northernmost province of Luzon.

Gremlin wrote:

While the US is focused on Florence, the strongest storm of the year is about to hit the Philippines:

Listen, we don't even care about our own islands, don't expect us to start caring about other people's!

In all seriousness, I hope everyone there makes it through okay, and I hope they take evacuations more seriously than we do (although it would be hard not to).

We're hit by storms a lot so most of us are more prepared than the average person, I would think. Classes have been suspended in the capital and surrounding regions since Friday and many took the time to stock supplies and batten down the hatches. We have 5 days worth of ready-to-eat food at the apartment, and we specifically selected it for its elevation and wind protection. Others who have had to select lower elevation housing have been advised evacuation. Most heed it.

Several deaths have been confirmed. The winds really are something else. The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council has been convened since Thursday and they appear to be taking this very seriously.

Stay safe, Larry. We love you, man.

Mixolyde wrote:

Stay safe, Larry. We love you, man.

Well, strong like. Plus a large amount of respect.

LarryC wrote:

We have 5 days worth of ready-to-eat food at the apartment, and we specifically selected it for its elevation and wind protection.

Initially I thought, "What the hell kind of food is this?!"

Okay, it's dark humor, like, pitch-black humor, but this did make me laugh.

Duterte confesses: 'My only sin is the extrajudicial killings'

I feel like that's one of the biggies, Rodrigo.

He tends to overlook the fact that some people take murdering badly. Mass murder, too. That's like, Tuesday for them. What's the big deal?

Hello thread! Long time, no see!

Anyway, so as should've been expected, Jair Bolsonaro is the new leader of Brazil.

Think Ill just sit over in this corner and cry for a while.

It's like this relentless onslaught of terrible news, both in America and across the world. It's so hard to stay positive.

Honestly I can't blame them. I think Bolsonaro is going to be a disaster, but they were already having a disaster and were desperate for anyone that wasn't associated with Lula.

If you’re talking about electorate, then polls showed that Lula would have won if he was actually allowed to run.

If he's anything like Duterte, he'll be a total disaster. We now have cops who claim on camera that raping the relatives of suspects is just SOP for the police. The victim was a 14 year old girl.

Today, I talked to a recent Canadian (formerly of Brazil), he feels like Bolsonaro can’t be worse than Lula’s corruption. I hope he’s right, but it doesn’t feel like a step forward.

Further probing is difficult, even with his English being 1000x better than my Portuguese. (All 4 words... and I’m not counting “Shakira”).

Aetius wrote:

I think Bolsonaro is going to be a disaster, but they were already having a disaster and were desperate for anyone that wasn't associated with Lula.

Basically. I also think Bolsonaro is going to be a disaster, but yeah, considering the spectacular corruption PT had been linked to and the homicide rate, I can understand how he got the gig.

Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:

Today, I talked to a recent Canadian (formerly of Brazil), he feels like Bolsonaro can’t be worse than Lula’s corruption. I hope he’s right, but it doesn’t feel like a step forward.

Further probing is difficult, even with his English being 1000x better than my Portuguese. (All 4 words... and I’m not counting “Shakira”).

Communication is overall better when one's hips are incapable of falsehood.

(BTW, wish the guy luck with winter for me.)

Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:

(All 4 words... and I’m not counting “Shakira”).

That's good. Because the Incredible Shakira is Colombian!

TAZ89 wrote:
Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:

(All 4 words... and I’m not counting “Shakira”).

That's good. Because the Incredible Shakira is Colombian!

Oh shiiiiii.... 0.o

As for the winter... he was super-pumped when we got some (probably here to stay) snow, yesterday. I didn’t have the heart to say “yeah, just wait until it’s still here in March/April”.

Arise thread!

So, one of the stories rolling around right now is what to do with "ISIS Brides," the women who left their families in the west to join the Islamic State's attempt at creating a caliphate in the Middle East. There are two big names out there right now, Shamima Begum from the UK, and Hoda Muthana, of the U.S.

Their stories are interesting and a bit complicated. Begum left for the Islamic state when she was just 15, and while it can absolutely be argued that she is a victim of grooming and sex trafficking, she has done what can kindly be called a "sub-par" job on the whole "showing regret" front.

Meanwhile, Muthana is, by all appearances, immensely regretful about what she did, but she was 20 when she left to join the Caliphate, not simply a teen.

In Begum's case, the UK has issued a rather firm "Nah" and started the process of revoking her citizenship, arguing that the fact Begum’s parents are of Bangladeshi heritage means she can apply for citizenship of that country.

Shamima Begum, the teenager who travelled from east London to Syria to join Islamic State in 2015, has described Home Office plans to strip her of citizenship as “kind of heart-breaking”.

“I don’t know what to say,” she told ITV News. “I am not that shocked but I am a bit shocked. It’s a bit upsetting and frustrating. I feel like it’s a bit unjust on me and my son.”

LADY, YOU ARE NOT HELPING YOUR CASE HERE.

Anyway, doing this could pretty obviously set a dangerous precedent, not to mention that Bangladesh has also issued a pretty firm "No thank you."

International human rights law states that no person can be rendered stateless, and Begum's family are suing the UK government to at least bring her child back tot he UK. Muthana's family has also filed suit to bring her back to the US, after President Trump tweeted that she shouldn't/wouldn't be allowed back.

It's all a pretty grand clusterf*ck, one that I have a lot of mixed feelings about because this wasn't like they accidentally signed up for the wrong cooking class. They both joined a spectacularly cruel, violent death cult, and seem to have been largely fine with it until, y'know, things went south. Not to mention, depicting them as simply innocent victims/bystanders in IS's violence is almost certainly not the full story.

Pari Ibrahim, the executive director of the Free Yezidi Foundation, a group that was formed to support the vulnerable Yazidi community and create awareness about their political situation, told BuzzFeed News that she rejected the narrative that women who married ISIS soldiers — so-called “ISIS brides” — were innocent bystanders.

This week, Ibrahim and the foundation shared a video on Twitter calling for countries to focus on conducting actual investigations into the crimes of their citizens who had joined ISIS.

“There has been no effort to understand why these ISIS brides are guilty,” she told BuzzFeed News. “In some cases, [the wives] would lock our Yazidi women in the houses so they could not escape. They would force them to do manual labor, humiliate them in captivity; they were beaten and tortured by the ISIS wives.”

Thousands of Yazidi women and girls were forced into sexual slavery by ISIS as part of its genocide against Yazidis in northern Iraq.

As ISIS has lost its grip on its last remaining strongholds in eastern Syria, the families of fighters have fled and been placed into refugee camps by Kurdish-led forces. The discovery of a pregnant British 19-year-old in one such camp has led to intense debate over whether the women who joined ISIS should be prevented from returning home and stopped from becoming a danger to Western society.

....................................................

Even the term “ISIS brides” popularized in the media reduces the women merely to the fact of their marriage. While the women married to ISIS fighters were part of a system that abused all women, evidence suggests they used their relative power over Yazidi women to torture them further.

Ibrahim, 29, fled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with her family when she was 3 and now leads the Free Yezidi Foundation, based in the Netherlands.

She said she and her team had heard multiple testimonies from survivors about the role of women in the caliphate.

ISIS began its genocide against the Yazidis, an ethno-religious group in Iraq, in 2014 — killing men, taking women into captivity and forcing them into sexual slavery, and destroying Yazidi pilgrimage sites and houses of worship. In her book, The Last Girl, Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, who survived the ISIS torture camps, details the horrors faced by women like her who were sold in markets, and even on Facebook, sometimes for as little as $20.

The quite literal genocidal horrors faced by the Yazidi people, that these women were likely at least somewhat complicit in, hardens my heart against them further, I must admit.

It's all an awful, complicated clusterf**k. I am sure that I think stripping them of their citizenship is wrong, but a large chunk of me wants to say "you chose the insane death cult, this is your bed now, lie in it, and maybe we'll reconsider in a couple years." And yet, I also think that everyone deserves compassion and a second chance.... it's it's just a tough one.

I dont have enough compassion in me for second chances for these people.
But regardless, if they are citizens in our countries, we have to take them back. It is fairly crazy to hear the hypocrisy from some politicians right now, who want to keep our own problems out, and force them upon Iraq, Syria etc. while the very same people tend to be angry when other countries refuse to take their citizens back.

Take them back, then prosecute. Rendering them stateless could be a punishment, or that could be throwing out trash for other countries to suffer from. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, keeping them under close wraps would just make sense, unless your goal was to radicalize them further and push them towards terrorist organizations.

Exactly. Convict them of a crime or treat them like normal. The government can't strip citizenship just because they are unpopular.

Rights exists even especially when you don't deserve them.

Allow them home, and put them on trial.

100%. The Australian government has been a big abuser of its citizens.

If there ever was a time for US to follow Israels lead.