Around the World
Rod McGuirk and Jill Lawless
The Associated Press
Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:08 EST
© Associated Press
Oct. 6 1950 b/w file photo of 10 year old twins Brian Thomas Sullivan (left) and Kevin James Sullivan from Islington, London, who carry their luggage to the boat train 'Rangitoto' as they leave Liverpool Street station in London bound for Auckland, New Zealand.
Canberra, Australia - Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a historic apology Monday to thousands of impoverished British children shipped to Australia with the promise of a better life, only to suffer abuse and neglect thousands of miles from home.
At a ceremony in the Australian capital of Canberra attended by tearful former child migrants, Rudd apologized for his country's role in the migration and extended condolences to the 7,000 survivors of the program who still live in Australia.
"We are sorry," Rudd said. "Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused. Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care. Sorry for the tragedy -
the absolute tragedy - of childhoods lost."
Comment: Today's
Telegraph shares more stories of the abuse and suffering these children had to go through:
Sandra Anker, was sent to Australia when she was six. She described her experience as "one of the crimes of the century".
She told the BBC, "Why I was sent out is beyond me. I don't understand it. I was deprived of my rights as a British citizen and I feel the British government have a lot to answer for.
"I feel really angry about it and feel the British government should compensate us so that we can get back to England and get to be with our families.
"We've suffered all our lives. For the government of England to say sorry to us, it makes it right - even if it's late, it's better than not at all."
Ron Simpson and his sister, from Annisford, Newcastle upon Tyne, were shipped out to Australia in 1938 after his parents, who were very poor, saw an advertisement offering to educate children from poor families.
In a book by David Hill, The Forgotten Children, Simpson recalls his first horrific encounter at the Fairbridge Farm School in Molong, New South Wales.
"I was working in the kitchen when the chef pushed me into the toilet, bolted the door, ripped off my clothes and sodomised me," he said.
Another time, he slept through the bell one morning and was hit with a hockey stick as a punishment. The beating permanently damaged the vertebrae in his spine.
Another 'orphan' was Mary O'Brien, from London's East End, who was 13 when she left England in 1959 for the Fairbridge Farm School with her brother Paddy and sister Myrtle.
Mary stayed in the farm's visitor centre, Gloucester House, where she claims she was abused by one of the men responsible for her care.
"I was expected to clean up for them, serve them and their visitors. It was the most degrading part of my life. They treated me - he [treated me] - like sh**, sexually abused me," she said.
According to the
Globe and Mail ,
Canada won't apologize to British home children. As David Owen says however, one of the children who suffered abuse and his life was sacrificed to the British and Australian economic interests,
no apology will heal him.
And at the end of the day, apologies count for naught if not followed by actions that will secure the safety and well-being of children all over the world. As long as the children in Gaza, the West Bank, in Bagdad, in Peshawar, in London, in Paris, the New York, etc, are growing up suffering because of the policies of world politicians, Kevin Rudd's apology or Gordon Brown's or anyone's, will be nothing but a hypocritical performance in front of the cameras.
Riaz Khan
Associated Press
Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:03 EST
© Associated Press/Mohammad Sajjad
Pakistani police officers walk at the site of car bombing on a police station in Badh Ber, a town near Peshawar, Pakistan on Monday, Nov. 16, 2009
A pickup truck laden with explosives blew up in front of a police station in northwestern Pakistan on Monday, killing at least 4 people in an area that has become the focal point for militant retaliation against a recent army offensive.
The massive explosion caused a wide swath of destruction in the town of Badh Ber, severely damaging the station and a nearby mosque and completely destroying several houses and shops.
Suspected militants have killed more than 300 civilians and security personnel in the last month in an attempt to weaken the country's resolve to continue the military operation in the tribal area of South Waziristan, where al-Qaida and Taliban leaders
are believed to be hiding.
Press TV
Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:00 EST
© Unknown
A powerful bomb blast has rocked Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar, killing at least five people and injuring 37 others.
The explosion happened near a police station in Budabher area on Kohat Road on the outskirts of Peshawar on Monday morning, police officials told Press TV.
The death toll of the incident is expected to rise as the injured people are in critical condition.
Several buildings and shops have been destroyed in the blast.
It was the fifth bomb explosion in just over a week to hit Peshawar that is a border city with Afghanistan.
Al Jazeera
Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:52 EST
© Agence France-Presse
Karzai said nobody cared about Afghanistan before the September 11 attacks
Afghanistan's president has come out fighting against calls by the US to crack down on corruption, arguing that his government is not solely to blame and saying that the West is in his country only for its own ends.
Hamid Karzai made the comments in a US television interview on Monday, days after his American counterpart, Barack Obama, told the newly re-elected leader that he must do more to make his government accountable to the people.
Responding to those criticisms, Karzai told the US Public Broadcasting Service that he had always sought to crack down on corruption within his government when there was sufficient evidence.
"Where we have found such corruption, we have addressed it. Where this is only talk, and nothing else, then of course that doesn't get reduced," he said.
Tom Coghlan
The Times
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:21 EST
Images scroll across the computer screen: crowds lining the streets of Wootton Bassett, coffins draped with the Union Jack and the faces of British soldiers killed last week in Helmand. Above them a banner reads "Voice of Jihad" and a ticker tape entitled "Hot News" announces a stream of alleged military successes.
This is the website of the Taleban, infamous for their wholesale rejection of modernity, who have banned television and the internet. Yet since 2006, the Taleban have been harnessing that same despised technology in an escalating campaign of propaganda against which Nato appears to have no effective answer.
Huge resources are now being committed to catching up. Nato's new communications directorate opened in Kabul this year and employs 120 staff.
Jeremy Page
The Times
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:15 EST
You have to go to a tropical paradise to find the latest front in the brewing cold war between China and India.
On the southernmost tip of the Maldives lies the island of Gan, a tiny patch of coconut palms and powdery white beaches. It was here that Britain set up a secret naval base in 1941, building airstrips and vast fuel tanks to support its fleet in the Indian Ocean during the Second World War.
The RAF then used it as a Cold War outpost until 1976, when the British withdrew and the officers' quarters were converted into a resort called Equator Village.
Now, 33 years later, India is preparing to reopen the base to station surveillance aircraft, helicopters, and possibly ships, to monitor Chinese vessels in the Indian Ocean. Under a deal signed in August, India is also installing radar across the Maldives, linked to its coastal command.
Press TV
Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:05 EST
© Unknown
Malalai Joya says that all foreign forces must leave Afghanistan.
Afghan political activist Malalai Joya says that all US and NATO forces must leave her homeland.
"Eight years ago, the US and NATO - under the banner of women's rights, human rights, and democracy - occupied my country and pushed us from the frying pan into the fire," Joya said from San Francisco in a telephone interview that was published on Thursday in
The Straight.
Joya is finishing up a US tour where she has pressed the Obama administration to withdraw foreign troops from the country.
Agence France-Presse
Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:55 EST
© Unknown
The international pirates, mostly European corporations, are often supported by navy warships on their illegal dumping and pillaging voyages through Somali waters
Somali pirates have seized a United Arab Emirates-flagged cargo ship loaded with weapons bound for the anarchic Horn of Africa nation in contravention of a U.N. arms embargo, maritime experts said on Monday.
Also on Monday, the gunmen launched their longest range hijack attempt yet -- opening fire on a giant Hong Kong-flagged crude oil tanker 1,000 nautical miles east of Mogadishu.
Andrew Mwangura of the East African Seafarers' Assistance Programme told Reuters he believed the weapons ship was using a fake name. He said it had been hijacked on Sunday and was now held near the northern Somali town of Garacad.
"She is one of the regular weapons carriers circumventing the U.N. arms embargo on Somalia," Mwangura said. Maritime sources say the craft is believed to be carrying light arms and ammunition, as well as rockets and rocket-propelled grenades.
IOL
Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:46 EST
French commandos stormed aboard a Somali pirate "mothership" and arrested 12 gunmen, the military announced, adding that the gangs are increasingly operating in the deep waters of the Indian Ocean.
Tipped off by spotters on a Luxembourg maritime reconnaissance plane, the French frigate Floreal intercepted a dhow towing two motorised skiffs 500 nautical miles northwest of the Seychelles on Thursday.
A helicopter from the warship fired a warning shot across the vessel's bows as its crew began to throw incriminating material over the side. French troops boarded the ship and arrested the pirates without violence.
On board they found grappling hooks, GPS navigation devices and assault rifles, French military spokesperson Admiral Christophe Prazuck told AFP in Paris.
Richard Norton-Taylor
Guardian.co.uk
Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:27 EST
© Unknown
Is that British troops being dropped off at the battlefield or Taliban units? Whatever, same team...
British officials are increasing pressure on the Afghan government to talk to Taliban leaders as part of a major attempt at reconciliation, it emerged today.
The move is strongly backed by the Foreign Office - notably Sherard Cowper-Coles, the government's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan - by MI6, and by Lieutenant General Graeme Lamb, former head of the SAS and Britain's senior military officer in Kabul, the Guardian understands.
Lamb was deployed to Afghanistan with the task of persuading insurgents to give up their arms. He believes many young and rank-and-file Taliban fighters carry a sense of "anger and grievances that have not been addressed".
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And at the end of the day, apologies count for naught if not followed by actions that will secure the safety and well-being of children all over the world. As long as the children in Gaza, the West Bank, in Bagdad, in Peshawar, in London, in Paris, the New York, etc, are growing up suffering because of the policies of world politicians, Kevin Rudd's apology or Gordon Brown's or anyone's, will be nothing but a hypocritical performance in front of the cameras.