Category: Other

Both CTV and NBC had choice words for the International Olympic Committee when Israeli athletes walked into the Olympic stadium during the opening ceremonies of the XXX Olympiad.

From CTV:

Brian Williams: And as Israel prepares, my position is well known and it is one that I have taken in previous Olympics. It is wrong that the IOC refuses to have a minute’s silence for the Israeli athletes that were slaughtered in Munich. It is a much bigger issue this year, as it’s the 40th anniversary of Munich. Members of the Canadian government, yesterday our Governor General, all calling for a moment’s silence. Dr. Rogge says the ceremony is not the place to remember a tragic event, but – it’s tragic – however it’s one of the most significant and world-changing events in Olympic history. It absolutely should have been done here. The IOC worries about politics? This event is political by its very nature.
 
Lisa LaFlamme: The widow of one of the victims spoke out saying ‘they came with dreams, they went home in coffins.’ They want to be remembered here tonight.
 
Brian Williams: And remember – they died as Olympians.

NBC:

Bob Costas: There have been calls from a number of quarters for the IOC to acknowledge that, with a moment of silence at some point in tonight’s ceremony. The IOC denied that request, noting it had honored the victims on other occasions. And in fact, this week (IOC president) Jacques Rogge led a moment of silence before about 100 people in the Athletes’ Village. Still, for many, tonight, with the world watching, is the true time and place to remember those who were lost, and how they died.

While the IOC refuses to recognize the murder of Olympic athletes, it does what it can to satiate the same type of hatred,

London 2012 organising committee officials erected a makeshift curtain to split the two halves of a training gym at the ExCeL centre on Friday afternoon to placate the Lebanese team, which was refusing to train at the same time as the Israelis.
 
Earlier officials from another country, Iran, said they would compete against Israel but that view has since been contradicted by officials in Tehran.

Laureen, that is…

President Obama,

“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Laureen Harper,

“I know this is the part of the speech where I am supposed to tell you how important it is to pursue your dreams. And that is important; one of my dreams was to travel around the world, and I did that, and it was wonderful.
 
But I believe even more than that, is you need to realize that you can go far in this world if you work hard. You will compete against people who went to expensive private schools, people who have connections that you don’t have, or people who have more money than you do.
 
And you cannot compete against that. In fact, sometimes you feel inadequate when you hear about the fancy schools your competitors will come from — schools with several thousand kids, with dozens of different options to choose from.
 
But there is one way you can compete, and that is with hard work. You can go a long way in this world with hard work.

h/t @adamdaif

One month ago, a wayward bureaucrat (or rapporteur as he is styled) found himself in Canada and decided to tear a strip off our country on the topic of food security in Canada. Yes, while Canada sends billions of food aid to developing countries, the UN came to criticize Canada for how available food is to poor and aboriginal communities. Canada is 6th on the human development index, and while poverty and famine grip other regions such as the horn of Africa, the scant resources of the UN were used to study Canada.

Today, we learned of the head of the UN’s Health Agency’s trip to North Korea where she praised that country for its health system and said that it should be the “envy” of the developing world,

“Based on what I have seen, I can tell you they have something that most other developing countries would envy,” [the head of the UN’s health agency] told journalists, despite reports of renewed famine in parts of the country.

 

“To give you a couple of examples, DPRK has no lack of doctors and nurses, as we see in other developing countries, most of their doctors and nurse have migrated,” the director general of the World Health Organisation said.

 

She also highlighted its “very elaborate health infrastructure” extending to a district network of household doctors, she added.

 

Chan visited the closed communist nation Monday through Wednesday at the regime’s invitation.

 

She met senior ministers and visited health facilities in the capital Pyongyang, as well as a rural hospital about an hour’s drive away.

 

Her visit to Pyongyang came amid reports of a severe food crisis in North Korea.

 

Good Friends, a Seoul-based welfare group with contacts in the North, said in February that 2,000 people had starved to death there this winter.

 

A growing number of North Koreans have fled their homeland, which has relied on outside aid to help feed its people since a famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands.

North Korean officials offer stage-managed propaganda tours for visiting tourists and dignitaries that is so predictable, the same stops (and sanctioned photo essay) unfolds for any outsider that visits: statues, monuments, the metro, and empty dining halls with lots of food. When tours go off-script, they are noted as a newsworthy aberration.

It’s no surprise that the article describing the UN tour of North Korea ended with this concession,

Chan later accepted that what she saw in Pyongyang “might not be representative of the rest of the country.

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